Music subscription services have been around for a long time. Now they're finally a real business: Companies like Spotify, Deezer and even Google generated more than $1.1 billion in music subscription revenue last year.
But the global music industry, which had finally perked up last year after a decade-plus slide, drooped again.
Worldwide wholesale revenue declined 3.9 percent, to $15 billion, in 2013, according to the music trade group International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. Much of that drop comes from Japan, were sales plummeted nearly 17 percent. If you strip out Japan's results, sales would have been down 0.1 percent.
Read the whole story at Re/code.
—By Peter Kafka, Re/code.net.
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