Streaming music was a huge component of the music industry in 2014. While album sales saw an 11.2 percent decline, streaming music saw a 32 percent increase from the previous year. The ongoing dominance is now getting the attention of musicians who are seeing another way of getting their songs to play.

Last May saw the $3 billion sale of Beats Music — created by rapper/producer Dr. Dre — to Apple. It was the biggest deal in history for Apple in hopes of using the streaming music service as a way to bolster iTunes album sales.

But Apple, which launched its iTunes Radio streaming service in 2013, has yet to capitalize on Beats Music since the purchase. Industry experts speculate that Apple will merge the two services in a rebranding move.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said the acquisition would help bridge the divide between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

"We love the subscription service that they built," he said. "We think it's the first subscription service that really got it right."

iTunes saw a 14 percent drop in music sales in the last year. Despite the slump, Apple has forged forward and sees that Beats might be the solution that the technology company is looking for to rescue sales.

In January, Apple also bought the British startup music analytics company Musicmetric as the company looks to relaunch the subscription music streaming service. The plan would be to push the service as part of its iOS software to increase the numbers of its subscriber base and to rival competitor Spotify.

Subscription streaming services seem to be all the rage in the music industry at the moment. Dave Bakula, Nielsen's senior vice president of industry insight, said the decline of downloads happened mainly because of "a shift in the way consumers are consuming music."

Another rapper making a move into the streaming music business is Jay Z. Last week, his company Project Panther Bidco Ltd agreed to buy the Scandinavian company Aspiro, which runs the music streaming services WiMP and Tidal, for $56 million.

Jay Z told Reuters his company had been following Aspiro for some time and sees it as "an innovative, high-quality company with future growth potential." Unlike other popular streaming services, WiMP and Tidal rely on high-priced and high-fidelity music streaming.

In October 2014, Aspiro launched the music streaming service Tidal in the U.S. and U.K. The company is similar to Spotify in the music library it offers, but its tracks are higher in quality and costs $19.99 a month for a subscription as opposed to the $9.99 rate that Spotify offers.

In a statement, Jay Z and his company shared this insight when it comes to the shift to streaming services: "[Streaming] offers great potential for increased entertainment consumption and an opportunity for artists to further promote their music."

While some musicians are ready to dive into the streaming industry, there are others who are skeptical of it.

After her Oct. 27 release of "1989," singer Taylor Swift withdrew her entire music catalog from the popular streaming site Spotify.

In her op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, Swift wrote: "Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically. ... Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.

"It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

While Swift's album has hit the 4 million mark in sales in the U.S., Spotify has continued to increase their numbers as well.

Spotify recently announced that its subscribers based had increased to 15 million subscribers to go along with its 60 million active monthly listeners. Spotify told Billboard that 80 percent of new subscribers came from the free mobile app.

"Here's the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable bottom line: The vast majority of music listening is unpaid," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote. "If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention in the first place."