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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1384448
percent). After that, the priorities are: • Low price – 56 percent • Ease of making playlist – 48 percent • Ease of downloading – 43 percent • Good algorithm for finding music – 36 percent • Exclusive music – 24 percent • Brand trust – 19 percent • Virtual assistant – 10 percent • Availability of video – 12 percent Spotify had the highest share of music subscribes worldwide last year – 35 percent, accounting for more than 144M subscribers. France’s Deezer is aggressively pursuing Spotify, growing from 2M in 2012 to 10M last year. Apple Music, Amazon, Tencent, and YouTube Music have their own strong user bases with market shares of 19 percent, 15 percent, 11 percent and 6 percent respectively. The great thing is that streaming has enabled artists to reach an ever-larger global audience, and music fans have been able to enjoy a much more diverse catalog of content from … everywhere. Streaming music has not only helped the industry continue to grow, it has also proven that music really is a global and is truly a universal language we can all understand and enjoy. Serious Play Our pixel-pushing friend, Jon Peddie (Jon Peddie Research), is fond of saying there are two types of people in the world – those who play video games and those who lie. But we really haven’t been into games since our years of working with the Tramiel’s/Atari to roll out two fantastic gaming platforms – Atari 2600/5200 game consoles and the fantastic 8/16-bit, color screen Lynx handheld. A helluva’ lot of fun! But today, it’s a whole new game played across almost every platform and device you can imagine. Gaming has gone crazy in the era of social distancing. For example, Steam – a storefront for personal video gaming – had over 23M concurrent players in March of last year while Nintendo had profits soar 41 percent with the release of Switch’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Socialization among regular and new players has fostered a new strength of global relationships with the new interactive content. Microsoft recorded a 130 percent increase in multiplayer engagements mid-last year and CTA found that 26 percent of Americans played video games for the first time during the at-home period. Gaming emerged as the dominant social media platform last year, moving from simple, battle royale games to live virtual concerts inside games and interactive, non-linear experiences. To keep employees interested, involved and connected as people increasingly WFH, companies have even begun using video games as a dynamic alternative to Zoom meetings. With the arrival of new consoles last year, the gaming software market enjoyed a significant bump in sales across all sectors – PC, console, mobile and VR. Increasingly, video games are following the streaming