BUZZANGLE'S 2016 INDUSTRY REPORT: A DATA FEAST

Jim Lidestri’s BuzzAngle Music, our data partner, has unleashed its 2016 U.S. Music Industry Report, and it’s a hefty data-bomb, packed with insights about streams, sales, physical (notably vinyl) vs. digital, gains and declines against 2015 and plenty more (right down to the biggest days of the week for streams and sales).

The big picture first: Overall consumption ticked up nearly 5%, as a record high in audio streams (250.7 billion, up a whopping 82.6%) offset declines in sales.

Here's a data point to make your heart go pit-a-pat: “There were more streams on any given day during 2016 than there were song downloads for the entire year.”

Pop was the leading genre in total album consumption, hip-hop in song consumption and, unsurprisingly, Urban songs made up a huge 30% of all streams. Rock led in song sales.

Interestingly, new releases made up 20% of sales but only 8.5% of streams.

The Weeknd was the most streamed artist over the holiday season, while the biggest album during that period—again, not a shock—was A Pentatonix Christmas.

Drake is BuzzAngle’s Artist of the Year, having earned 6.1m in “total album consumption units” (album sales + singles sales + streams); he claims Album of the Year with Views (#1 overall, #2 in sales behind Adele), Streams and Total Consumption, as well as Male Urban Artist.

Adele is named Female Pop Artist of the Year, Justin Bieber Male Pop Artist of the Year, Pentatonix Pop Duo/Group, Beyoncé Female Urban Artist, Carrie Underwood Female Country Artist, Chris Stapleton Male Country Artist, Florida Georgia Line are Country Duo/Group, and the late, great Prince is Rock Artist.

Additionally, the report is embedded with eye-catching stats. Try these on for size:

Approximately 50% of all forms of consumption (physical/digital album sales, song sales and audio streams) in 2016 was from Deep Catalog titles, those released over three years ago. For video streams, it is over 60%.

New Releases, less than eight weeks old, represented 8.5% of audio streams, but over 20% of album sales.

Vinyl album sales were up 25.9% over 2015 while CD album sales were down 14.0%. Vinyl albums accounted for 8.0% of all physical album sales.

Friday and Saturday were the largest vinyl album sales days of the week, each at 17%. Vinyl album sales experienced a unit increase of 38% on Fridays compared to 2015.

There's much more where these came from—look 'em up yourself. You can also drill down into the Great White North with BuzzAngle's new Canada report.