The music industry is looking...better!

Hello from the other side of a massive industry decline.

The music industry in the first half of 2016 enjoyed its strongest revenue increase since the mid-1990s, according to a report from the Recording Industry Association of America.

That the industry is bringing in more cash at all is a distinct change from the past 15 years, during which the shift away from CDs to digital downloads and then streaming led to a steep decline in how much money could be made from recorded music.

Streaming services, which spent years being maligned by the recording industry, are leading the comeback. Subscriptions in particular are key, as ad-based streaming makes little money.

"The revenue growth from subscriptions alone more than offset the declines from physical sales and permanent digital downloads," Joshua Friedlander, the senior vice president of strategic data analysis at the RIAA, wrote in the report.

Streaming revenue now accounts for almost half of the industry's income.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Aside from streaming, just about everything else is in decline. Revenue from digital downloads and music videos dropped sharply, as did sales of physical CDs. Even music on vinyl -- a surprising bright spot for the industry thanks to its relatively high prices -- declined, albeit at a slower pace than the other formats.

The growth is encouraging, and there's hope that the streaming industry has plenty of upside left. There are around 100 million people paying for streaming services worldwide, and growth for services like Spotify, Apple, Tidal and plenty of other competitors has been mostly accelerating.

Spotify recently boasted that it has reached 40 million subscribers.

The optimism around the growth of streaming is stymied by just how far the industry has fallen. Total sales remain far below their peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as illustrated in the chart below.