Source: Nielsen Music.
Song downloads plunged another 12.5 percent last year, and a depressing 23.4 percent since 2013, according to preliminary US-based stats from Nielsen Music. Indeed, downloading is plunging downward, but streaming is absolutely soaring: according to the same dataset, the total number of streams doubled in just one year.
As in, gained 100 percent, in 365 days.
Overall, Americans streamed 317.2 billion tracks last year, up from 164.5 billion songs streamed in 2014. Leading the pack were the typical suspects: YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, and Google Play Music, but doesn’t include ‘non-interactive’ radio streams like Pandora. Most of that streaming was free, with YouTube and Spotify still avalanching the space with ad-supported music.
Indeed, ad-supported streaming is big and getting bigger, but it still makes less than vinyl. In 2015, according to the top-level look, total LPs boomed 29.8 percent to 11.9 million units. CDs, unsurprisingly, continued to slide into oblivion (more details on all formats in the coming days).
How much money did it generate for artists/labels/songwriters?
+ 1
Mark Mulligan reports on the grim reality…
” Though the drop was small – 1% – it was still nonetheless a drop at a period when digital spending should be booming. In some key markets the consumer spending decline was significantly larger, such as a 3% fall in the UK. ”
https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/consumer-spending-on-digital-music-actually-fell-in-2014-yes-you-read-that-right/
Next…
WITHOUT ADELE IT WOULD BE 5% DROPPP!
Thank you UMG for creating this blossoming streaming ELDORADOOO!
…and the revenues of music industry have blinked up or down within 5%!
Time to convert STREAMING and RADIO to $100B discovery moment monetization music store.
No need for subscriptions or advertising around free – those methods will bring at the most $25B by 2025.
1999 = today $66B – conclusion: UMG induced SUICIDE continues with CONTRACTION of obvious to an IDIOT $200B of music goodwill to $20B STREAMING SWAMP!
Stop spamming this site, asshole.
Hey Anonymous, Before calling names bring valid (I mean VALID) arguments against my solution.
You must be one of those busy bodies at UMG music suicide enterprise!
There’s no chance that people will pay to identify a song, Remi.
Even if everyone was somehow stupid enough to make this the new basis for monetizing music- there would be 10,000 pirate workarounds for it in the first day of it going live.
We all love your effort and enthusiasm Remi, but this is as stupid an idea as deciding to sell downloads for 10 times more to increase music revenues by ten times.
You need around 20 million dollars a year to be professional music PIMP like Google, Shazam or Soundhound!
It takes money to have freshly updated data base of someones goods and and search thru it on demand.
Trillions of music IDs involving storage and processing of someone’s property done for FREE at the request of FREELOADER will not deliver dollars to music industry. They vent all the life blood out of the music.
Enjoy good tunes for free! You want to extinguish curiosity or better yet, listen to it again at any time or any place? Pay for addition to the play list!
Interesting that Pandora’s streams weren’t counted. Pandora streamed well over 300 Billion tracks by themselves which would more than double the number provided above.
What does it really matter, if over 90% of Pandora’s streams are for free subscribers? Unless people are paying you do you really have a business? Anyone can give anything away for free.
When I look at these numbers they all represent billions of small cuts on the backs of creators.
More numbers are coming out, but keep in mind this is y/o/y, meaning Pandora wasn’t in the on-demand dataset last year or previous years either.
The first thing I thought when I read that Spotify was going to start streaming the Beatles? Would it put them out of business… faster. Freemium not only hurt the music business, it has created an endless, cascading money drain for the uTorrent duo. Pump and dump, baby. That’s the American way.
On a more positive note. Physical product sales are far from dead, so can we amend the hype. “Streaming is the future, FOR SOME.
“The compact disc – launched in 1982 – enjoyed its best year in a decade, declining just 3.7% and generating sales of £468m.
“IT IS CLEARLY WAY TOO EARLY TO WRITE OFF THE CD OR OTHER DISC-BASED FORMATS.”
KIM BAYLEY, ERA
Compact discs are proving much more resilient than music downloads, the format which was tipped to replace them and which is now clearly well off its 2013 peak, declining in value 13% to less than £300m in 2015.
According to further BPI data, UK CD album sales stood at 53.6 million units in 2015, down just 3.9% on 2014 – and still accounting for 66% of all albums purchased in the UK.
And vinyl had another cracking year, up 64% from 1.3m units in 2014 to 2.1m copies.
Said ERA’s CEO Kim Bayley, “It is clearly way too soon to write off the CD or other disc-based formats. Hopefully we have now all learned the lesson of the vinyl LP that older formats can happily co-exist with newer ways of enjoying entertainment.”
Music Business Worldwide.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
“The compact disc – launched in 1982 – enjoyed its best year in a decade, declining just 3.7%”
This is your good news? This is what we should be celebrating? Instead of more music being created and listened to than in all of human history?
Copyright stagnated as a model for bringing value around music when the labels and other intermediaries got too greedy. Lawsuit after class action lawsuit was settled for their price-fixing, they ignore digital technology, and their industry collapsed. Artists were screwed most of the time anyway.
The new model for bringing value around music is not only concerned with bringing entertainment dollars. The value of music has always been beyond $ but we all know you need $ to make it. Recording and marketing costs plummet, so the $ needed to make music is exponentially less than it used to be. Give the tools of creation to anybody with a computer. Of course that’s going to devalue music as a corporate entertainment product. What we gain as a society is that now music is not just measured in units sold, but how it affects people. And they reciprocate the value with their attention (worth $ in advertising) and patronage. Ask any musician under 30 who bought a house last year on their earnings. There are fewer of them, but they’re not gone. And that’s fine, because what took the place of the 25-50% of professional musicians that can no longer rely on copyright for creating value around music is a vibrant culture of music creation and sharing. This is the very purpose of copyright and people like you give musicians a band name by complaining all the time that what’s best for society steals money from your pocket.
You are desperately grasping at the last dying hair on the severed head of the music industry.
When will the curtains of cognitive dissonance part to reveal you were wrong 5 years ago, and every year that goes by, you only become more wrong? Let it go and join us in this exciting new world where the value of music is not measured in record label revenues, but in the value to the fan. We are having so much funI You are clearly not having as much fun as us if you have to hang out in the Digital Music News comments section all the time with Remi.
” And that’s fine, because what took the place of the 25-50% of professional musicians that can no longer rely on copyright for creating value around music is a vibrant culture of music creation and sharing.”
By all means, let’s celebrate mediocrity. You play, Zac?
And isn’t it wonderful Zac that the execs from Spotify and Pandora can buy Tesla’s and Mansions, while you dance around the maypole. Dude, wake up.
This is a good thing, right? I mean, while it didn’t generate a lot of money for artists/labels/songwriters, it did give them exposure.
Exposure? That’s a croc. This exposure myth is a load of crap. Also, if you’re not going to pay the songwriter a decent amount from streaming, then the industry will collapse.
Streams double, while revenue from consumers goes down. Great business model.
Paul, Nielsen ‘Music’ combined audio and video, they included YouTube which is awash with unlicensed content.
What we really need to see:
Paid streams / ad-supported streams / YouTube Videos broken out.