It’s been a few weeks since we got a reminder of how successful music streaming but the news that Netflix is no longer more popular than music streaming is a major reminder.

In recent years streaming has become massive, whether it be binging your favourite shows, listening to all your favourite music, watching YouTube or anything else. Whilst Netflix has been slowly working towards world domination as the biggest VOD service music streaming has been following closely behind, until now.

According to figures in a recent report from Midia there were just slightly over 100 million people paying for music streaming subscriptions in 2016. Whilst music subscriptions rising by 48% from 68 million the year before is impressive on it’s own, the massive growth of music streaming has put it ahead of Netflix which reportedly ended last year with 87.8 million subscribers.

Whilst Netflix alone may not be ahead of the entire music industry anymore they still saw great performance in 2016 with a 24% rise compared to 2015’s subscribers. However whilst Netflix’s rise has been a steady rise year on year the reason music streaming is so notable is thanks to it’s exponential growth in recent years, despite services like Spotify having been around for 8+ years.

The figures for overall music streaming subscriptions were made up from various different music services. Midia’s Mark Mulligan estimates that roughly 43 million belong to Spotify, 20.9 million subscribe to Apple Music, 6.9 million to Deezer, 4.5m to Napster and extra million subscribers from Jay-Z’s Tidal. The remaining subscription counts were made up from the various smaller services.

Midia says that with music streaming’s exponential growth in recent years and has established itself as part of the industry we could see things begin to change for the standards of music streaming. They said in their report: “At some stage, perhaps in 2017, we will see streaming in many markets hit the glass ceiling of demand that exists for the 9.99 price point. Additionally the streaming-driven download collapse and the impending CD collapses in Germany and Japan all mean that it would be unwise to expect recorded music revenues to register uninterrupted growth over the next 3 to 5 years.

“But growth will be the dominant narrative and streaming will be the leading voice. 100 million subscribers might not the mean the world changes in an instant, but it does reflect a changing world.