Streaming Services Are Giving Music Market ‘Significant Momentum,’ Sony Brass Says

“We expect the music business to be on the rise again,” executive tells media analysts on Q3 conference call

Adele

The music playing for reporters on hold before Sony Corporation’s investor conference call on Friday was Adele’s chart-topping “25” album. That was quite fitting, considering some of the most interesting talk would surround what company CFO Kenichiro Yoshida called the “bottoming out” of the music market.

And that’s actually a good thing, in the shared minds of Sony executives, meaning there is only one way to go from here, and that’s up.

“We are having quite significant momentum in the music streaming,” Yoshida told media analysts on the call. “Because of that, we find that the music market is finally bottoming out due to the rise of streaming — such as Spotify and Apple Music — after 15 years of decline.”

Yoshida has the extremely long title of executive deputy president and CFO, representative corporate executive officer — so he probably knows what he’s talking about.

“We’re very positive with the growth in the streaming market,” Steve Kober, chief financial officer of Sony Corporation of America chimed in. “To some extent it’s replacing the download business.”

“We expect the music business to be on the rise again,” Kober concluded.

In other words, “Hello,” music dollars, it’s Sony — they were wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet.

Sony is also quite bullish on its gaming division, as PlayStation 4 and its upcoming Virtual Reality launch is generating profits and excitement, respectively. Read all about Sony’s fiscal third-quarter 2015 earnings here.

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