But Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify (pictured), has long argued that the virtues of streaming would be manifest only when it achieved scale. That has begun to happen. In addition to Spotify’s subscribers who pay $10 a month (at least 70m more use its ad-supported free service), Apple Music has 30m subscribers and other music services have at least 70m more, according to MIDiA Research, a consultancy (see chart 2). Songs from the most popular artists now routinely surpass 1bn streams on subscription services—“Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran was Spotify’s top track in 2017 as of early December, with 1.4bn streams. On average a billion streams on subscription services brings in about $7m for big labels, with perhaps $1m of that going to the artists. Another pot of money goes to songwriters and composers.

With a big and widening lead over its competitors, Spotify has quickly become the industry’s most important distributor. Redburn, a research firm, estimates that in the first quarter of 2017 Spotify accounted for 17% of the $5bn in revenues taken by record labels, and its share is growing. That gives it several points of leverage that could help it turn around its operating losses.