We were defined by our album collections, until we switched to cassettes, but really loved the clarity of CD’s, and now it’s all about streaming.
Music fans are turning to streaming to access their favorite hits in huge numbers, Drake’s song “God’s Plan” attracting more than 1.1 billion streams during the first six months of 2018. On-demand streams from services like Spotify and Apple Music have made the biggest advances, says David Bakula, Senior Vice President of Analytics and Client Development at Nielson. “As we see album purchasing and song purchasing declining by 15%, 20%, 25% year over year, we’re seeing streaming grow by 40+ percent.”
According to the Nielson Music Mid-Year Report, sales of CD’s are down 20%, but even digital album and single sales have dropped by at least 20%. Vinyl’s resurgent popularity grows by 19% year-over-year, but the focus is a 45% increase in on-demand streaming. “And we’re not talking about small numbers here. We’re talking about numbers that are in the hundreds of billions. We’ve had 260 billion audio streams so far this year, so to have that up 45% over last year is really tremendous growth,” says Bakula.
Hip-Hop continues its reign as top music genre with 31% of total volume, rock and roll at 23%. Growing in popularity, music by Latin artists is up 39%m with pop music up 19%.