European musicians now make more from Spotify than iTunes

Apple may want to queue up a good blues playlist on iTunes. In a report released today at the Web Summit in Dublin, music publisher Kobalt said that for the first time royalties collected by its European musicians from Spotify have eclipsed the royalties they received from iTunes. Kobalt reported that royalties from Spotify’s streaming service in the first three months of 2014 were 13% higher than those received from digital iTunes downloads. Just six months earlier, in Q3 2013, those artists received 32% more from iTunes. In Q4 2014, iTunes’ lead over Spotify had shrunk to 8%, according to Kobalt.

Spotify may be smarting from the removal of Taylor Swift’s music catalogue from its platform, and Taylor Swift may not care, since she is riding a sales blockbuster in the form of her new album 1989, but it turns out that in the bigger picture, Spotify’s streaming service continues to gain an edge over downloads, specifically via iTunes. Kobalt, a company that helps collect music royalties on behalf of thousands of artists — including “half of this week’s Billboard Top 10″ and musicians like Maroon 5, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Grohl, Max Martin, Bob Dylan, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis — says that in the last quarter in Europe, revenues from Spotify streams were 13% higher on average than revenues from Apple’s iTunes for its customers. The numbers support findings reported in the Wall Street Journal last month noting that iTunes music sales are down about 13% this year. iTunes is still a massive business — up $300 million to $4.6 billion in sales in the last quarter — but that doesn’t point to how well music is doing within that.