If anyone’s worried the rise of music streaming is causing a drop in revenue they can take comfort in Sony’s new financial report, showing soaring profits.

Sony Music have released their quarterly report for April 1st to June 30th and shows a brilliant increase of $1.374 billion. That’s a 8.7% increase from the same quarter last year and exceeded the expectations of analysts. 

Sony’s impressive earnings increase has been credited by the major label to a massive rise in music streaming, whilst also acknowledging the increased popularity in visual medias. In this quarter the report shows that streaming made up $299 million of Sony’s earnings, a 38.4% increase on last years $216 million.

Streamings rise in revenues has been so powerful in fact that it’s offset a drop in physical music sales and digital downloads. Despite these drops Sony made an impressive overall increase of nearly 10% that proves streaming can be profitable as it rises in popularity and usage.

Despite their increases Sony saw their operating income drop from $310 million last year to $155 million this year though Sony say this is due partly to the “negative impact of the appreciation of the yen against the U.S. dollar”. However with the success of music streaming services and various successful Sony albums this quarter, driven by Kazumasa Oda’s ‘Anohi Anotoki’, Meghan Trainor’s ‘Thank You’ and in particular Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’, which has become Sony’s top selling recorded album.

Another drawback in Sony’s report that prevented it from increasing revenues even more was their equity in digital music distributor The Orchard. Sony bought the equity state of The Orchard last year when the company was reported to be valued at around $400 million. Since the buyout however Sony have had to take a “re-measurement” of their equity interest in the independent distributor.

Whatever’s happening to Sony though it can’t be denied that music streaming is on the rise and is giving a massive boost to the music industry that looked to be dwindling.