Music streaming service

A music streaming service is a type of streaming media service that focuses primarily on music, and sometimes other forms of digital audio content such as podcasts. These services are usually subscription-based services allowing users to stream digital copyright restricted songs on-demand from a centralized library provided by the service. Some services may offer free tiers with limitations, such as advertising and limits on use. They typically incorporate a recommendation engine to help users discover other songs they may enjoy based on their listening history and other factors, as well as the ability to create and share public playlists with other users. Streaming services saw a significant pace of growth in the late 2000s, overtaking music stores as the largest revenue stream of digital music. Streaming services, along with streams of music-related content on video sharing platforms, were incorporated into the methodologies of major record charts. The "album-equivalent unit" was also developed as an alternative metric for the consumption of albums, to account for digital music and streaming. Digital distribution of music began to achieve prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s; MP3.com and PeopleSound were the first two platforms, and early forerunners to platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, offering the ability for musicians (including, especially, independent musicians) to upload and distribute their songs online in the MP3 format. MP3.com later offered a service known as My.MP3.com, allowing users to rip and upload music from CDs they owned into a personal library they could stream via their accounts. The service was the subject of a lawsuit by Universal Music Group, which ruled that the service constituted the unauthorized distribution of their copyrighted music recordings. The lawsuit proved detrimental to the company; it was subsequently acquired by UMG's parent company Vivendi Universal, and later sold to CNET (which shut down its music distribution platform).