$5 BILLION PER YEAR FROM STREAMING ALONE? AWESOME.

If UMG labels alone earned $1.1 billion from streaming in the first half of the year, as Music Business Worldwide reported today, let's extrapolate. The House of Grainge's yearly take from the platform, at roughly 40% marketshare, means the biz as a whole is taking in more than $5 billion per annum from streaming alone.

No wonder Goldman Sachs published its recent love letter to music, hypothesizing that total industry revenues could reach $104 billion by 2030. "Streaming is a massive game-changer for the recorded music industry," analyst Lisa Yang said in the report.

The present numbers are big. But how much bigger might streaming get in the near future? Could we see a marked spike in streaming subs? Will the coming wave of new tech (the iPhone 8 and the next generation of personal-assistant gizmos, for starters) smooth the path to entry still further for previously reluctant consumers of streaming? We shall see.

But the present numbers are certainly reason to be of good cheer. Stream on, y'all.