According to Nielsen SoundScan (a system that tracks music sales in the United States and Canada), paying to download music will soon be a thing of the past.
Nielsen SoundScan predicts that by 2021, streaming music will have fully taken over and that there will soon be no one paying for digital downloads through iTunes, Amazon or any other services. By 2019, sales are expected to drop some 40%.
So you may be asking who are the leaders in music streaming currently? Both YouTube and Spotify lead the streaming music industry. In the United States, the number of streams this year doubled to 317.2 billion.
It seems that the only people buying music soon will be that of the DJs.