The next five years will almost certainly be five good years for the music industry," Bertelsmann's head of music Hartwig Masuch predicted recently in the FAZ. The analysts at Goldman Sachs are even looking ahead to 2030 - also with pronounced optimism.

The weakening advertising market may be dampening the mood somewhat at the moment, but overall there are good reasons for a fundamentally positive outlook.

First and foremost, after months of crisis, high inflation and soaring energy prices, there is the realization that consumers are saving on many things, but obviously the music streaming subscription is only one of them in very rare cases.

On the contrary, the figures from market leader Spotify show sustained growth.

Although it is no longer quite as strong in some western markets: permanent access to millions and millions of works for a price that is cheap in relation to other subscription services is and remains tempting.

The end of the 9.99 euro era will not change that.

At the end of October, Apple said goodbye to the standard price for a single subscription that had been in place for years.

That broke the dam.

The prices of the services are likely to rise across the board, Spotify has already indicated it.

In the future, the standard price will probably be 10.99 euros instead of 9.99 euros or, depending on the provider, more.

That means higher payouts to the industry from its main source of income.

Spotify is also likely to raise prices

Anyone who has previously received hardly any royalties from the marketing of their songs on Spotify and Co, because the number of streams is simply very poor, will hardly notice it.

Streaming is a mass business.

The big rights holders with their extensive catalogs should therefore rejoice.

Managers of the industry giants are only too happy to refer to growing income from platforms that were not originally designed for music, such as Facebook or fitness apps.

Even lofty goals for the metaverse are rarely missing, although some things are still pie in the sky.

Working with the short video app Tiktok is already firmly established, but the relationship with the successful app has seen better days.

Tiktok's Chinese parent company Bytedance is said to be working on rolling out its own music service Resso - coupled with the short video app, so that users no longer have to leave the service to listen to a song in full.

Until then, however, another chunk has to be cleared out of the way.

Because as much as the music industry likes to use Tiktok as a marketing and talent scouting tool, it is keen to rake in a larger share of the rapidly growing advertising revenue.

So far, Tiktok has been supposed to pay – certainly not small – one-off payments for licensing the song snippets.

Industry is now pushing for revenue sharing.

Both sides are dependent on each other.

But when Masuch says, if necessary, the repertoire does not have to be available on Tiktok for a quarter, it becomes clear in what a strong position the music industry believes it is.

Lots of bones of contention about streaming

There are also sources of conflict in “classic” streaming.

100,000 new songs are said to appear on the services every day.

Anyone can publish music themselves without significant effort.

Too confusing for users and too many poor-quality works, according to Universal Music boss Grainge.

In his annual newsletter to Universal employees, he just reiterated the criticism.

A kind of filter for financial reasons would certainly not be wrong for the services.

Hosting costs are rising, electricity is expensive - and streaming is a tough business for them anyway, when around two thirds of the total revenue is paid out to rights holders from the music industry.

However, a restriction of any kind would not be harmless.

The argument of differences in quality also harbors risks: the Deezer boss recently exaggerated the problem to the FAZ and got to the point.

It cannot be that the sound of a dishwasher is treated like a song by a Grammy winner when it comes to billing.

Just: where and how should the line be drawn between “high quality” and “less high quality”?

It gets even more complicated once AI-generated music floods the services.

In any case, the industry cannot even agree on a much simpler change: to distribute a user's subscription money only to the songs that are actually heard instead of to all of them according to market share.

The complex distribution debate has been raging for years and the type of billing is only one aspect.

Continued success will fuel them further.

This realization is also part of the outlook.