STREAMS HIT BIG BENCHMARK

Through the first six months of 2017, Spotify and Apple Music have grown their combined total U.S. streams by 60%. When this week ends, the two leading streaming services will have delivered about 160 billion individual song streams, compared with 100 billion through the same period last year.

That's over 105m album equivalents (SEA), or an increase of 40 million. With total album sales down by 18m YTD and track sales down by 94m (9.4 million TEA), streaming has given the industry a YTD increase of more than 12m SEA.

Leading music execs will be celebrating by ordering Swedish meatballs on their iPhones.