Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa, and this is Business Daily from the BBC.

And that is a musician and songwriter called Verite.

She's pretty much made a living out of the song she's singing there, called Somebody Else.

And it's all down to music streaming.

It's totally changed the way the music industry works.

And it's changed how pop stars are made.

You could choose to do everything from your desktop.

You could sit, look at the data, identify a track, sign it, you know, promote it without

ever leaving your desk and a computer screen.

The road to fame in our digital age is paved with data.

That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Americans streamed 403 billion songs in the first six months of this year.

That's according to the research group Nielsen.

The figures show that the music industry is in the midst of a growth spurt, with major

label groups recording revenues not seen in 15 years.

Now it used to be that streaming had a bad reputation. It was rife with piracy.

Now though, it's people's preferred way of listening to music.

Streaming is also completely changing the way new artists are discovered and promoted in the

industry. We'll come to that in just a moment.

First, though, our reporter and producer Edwin Lane, who's a bit of a music boffin and musician himself. He's been crunching the numbers for us.

Yeah, as you were saying, streaming services are a preferred way that many people listen to

music these days. Last year, in fact, streaming took over as the single biggest source of revenue

...