These worrying stats send a clear message: Give us a Spotify price rise now.

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2023 of Talking Trends – a podcast from Music Business Worldwide, supported by Voly Music. As ever on Talking Trends, we'll be diving behind a major entertainment industry headline to explain what’s really going on.It’s a new year, which means a bucketful of music biz statistics about the prior 12 months – in this case 2022 – are tumbling out of trade bodies in all major markets.The data Ingham focuses on here has just been published by the UK’s Entertainment Retailers’ Association, which both monitors the commercial entertainment market in Britain, and represents companies like Spotify, YouTube, Deezer and Amazon.The latest batch show a dramatic slowdown in the annual growth in money being spent on music streaming subscriptions in 2022.They suggest 'peak streaming' may be coming to the UK sooner rather than later – and seem to accentuate the need for streaming price rises (especially from Spotify) to keep growth at healthy levels in the years ahead.Music Business Worldwide's Podcasts are supported by Voly Entertainment (previously known as Voly Music).