by Felix Richter, Statista.com
Over the past couple of days, there’s been a lot of good news for all advocates of music streaming.
Shortly after the Financial Times reported that Apple Music has passed 10 million subscribers, market leader Spotify went on record saying that the company had enjoyed the fastest subscriber growth in its seven-year history in the second half of 2015. Estimates put Spotify’s subscriber base between 25 and 30 million and total monthly listeners – Spotify has an ad-supported free tier – between 75 and 100 million.
A few days earlier, Nielsen published its year-end report on the U.S. music industry saying that once again streaming was the big winner of the past 12 months. Without Apple Music, which Nielsen omitted from its count probably for the sake of comparability, the market research firm counted 317 billion on-demand streams in 2015, up 92.8 percent from the previous year’s total. That means streaming’s growth continued to accelerate as more and more people came around on the idea of streaming music rather than owning it.
As is to be expected, the growing popularity of streaming came at the expense of other market segments. CD album sales and album downloads declined by 11 and 3 percent, respectively, and digital track sales dropped by 12 percent. The only other format that is rising in popularity is vinyl. The format of analog music lovers continued its comeback with a 29 percent increase in LP sales.
This chart shows the year-over-year change in music streams, downloads and sales in the United States.
You will find more statistics at Statista.
