Streaming Was The Largest Form Of US Music Consumption In 2016
It was only a couple of years ago when we writing about how streaming had a long way to go to catch up with digital purchases and downloads of music. Well, 2016 was the year that streaming not only caught up, but dominated the way music was consumed in the US. Stats released by Nielsen have shown that for the first time ever, streaming topped the digital sales of songs and albums.
Here are the most important numbers: In the US alone, 431 billion songs were streamed during 2016. That makes for 1.2 billion songs streamed per day, which even blows away the 734 million song downloads that were made during the whole year. In total, streaming is said to have seen a 76% growth over the year before, with service including Spotify and Apple Music drawing in huge numbers of new subscribers.
Breaking things down, Nielsen found that Drake was single-handedly the US's biggest artist, with most total song streams at 5.4 billion, as well as the most digital sales of songs and albums. Desiigner's "Panda" and Rihanna's "Work" were among the top six songs of the year to be streamed over 500 million times.
It turns out the music industry as a whole has improved as well, growing by 3% over 2015. This includes increases in sales of physical albums for the first time in ten years, as well as vinyl sales reaching the highest they've been since 1991 with 13 million.