It will come as a surprise to very few, but we’re living in the midst of the Great Depression as far as the recorded music industry is concerned. But recently released data show that the worst could be behind us, and there could even be a light at the end of the tunnel.

As Quartz reports, new figures released by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry indicate that global revenue hit another low last year, falling below the $15 billion threshold in 2014 for the first time in recent memory.

The figures present a grim view of the present music industry. When adjusting for inflation, the global recorded music industry has basically been cut in half in less than two decades, a sobering factoid and one largely a result of piracy and online file-sharing.

There’s also the fact that consumers have made it known that they’re less interested in purchasing whole albums, the industry’s primary product bundle, than downloading individual tracks or compiling them into individual playlists on streaming services.

However, that’s actually where the good news comes in. The outlook of the industry over the next few years is, for all intents and purposes, actually pretty good. Streaming services, the IFPI is predicting, aren’t simply killing CDs, they’re usurping them.

According to some bullish projections, growth in streaming could be what leads the industry out of the darkness and into the light. Forecasts released by the Credit Suisse investment bank last year predict that if streaming goes mainstream, the industry could return to revenue growth as soon as next year.

Image via Quartz

While it’s safe to assume that our clued-in readers and all of their friends adopted Spotify and/or its peer services long ago, streaming is relatively niche. Spotify has 15 million paid subscribers of 60 million active users – not much when you look at the bigger picture.

But this is all poised to change. Spotify is all cashed up from a recent investment round and ready to expand, Apple is set to revolutionise the music industry once again with Beats Music, and YouTube, technically the biggest streaming service in existence, is readying its own service.

Last month, a group of investors at Vivendi, the French media conglomerate that owns the world’s biggest record label, Universal, forecast a particularly rosy picture. According to their calculations, by 2020, five percent of all smartphone users will be paying for a streaming subscription.

That’s over 250 million people spending roughly $120 a year, more than the average consumer spent on music even back during the halcyon days of the industry. So there could reasonably be a future in which a sizeable portion of consumers are spending more money on music than ever before.

Of course, streaming is not without its share of skeptics. Many high-profile musicians have come out against streaming services, accusing them of offering unjust royalty payments. However, streaming’s defenders claim that artists’ beef should be with their own labels.

Then there’s Martin Goldschmidt, founder of the UK-based indie label Cooking Vinyl, who says that the profit margins on digital music are much larger than physical music, since distribution costs are so much lower.

“An old finance director once said that revenue is vanity and profit is sanity,” he told Quartz. “So the focus on revenue risks missing the point.” Still, we’re hoping Credit Suisse’s predictions are accurate and the industry’s future looks a lot more like the graph predicts below.

Image via Quartz

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