The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is a trade organization that represents the recording industry in the United States. Since the program began in 1952, the RIAA's mission was to protect intellectual property rights, perform research about the music industry and monitor relevant laws.
For the first half of 2016, strong growth in revenues from subscription streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and SoundCloud have more than
offset declines in unit based sales of physical and digital music download products. The overall revenues at retail have increased 8.1% on a year-over-year basis to a staggering $3.4 billion. In fact, this is the strongest industry growth since the late 1990s, the RIAA reports.
To narrow down further on the report, the RIAA reported that subscriptions alone accounted for 30% of industry revenues.
