BUZZANGLE’S NUMBERS GAME, MID 2017 EDITION

2017 has reached its halfway point, which means BuzzAngle Music has crunched its numbers and dropped some major knowledge about consumer buying habits in its U.S. Mid-Year Music Industry Report. The Cliffs Notes version: Streaming continues to annihilate everything in its path. Consumption is still escalating, while sales–both physical and digital–keeps on trending downward. Except for vinyl, which continues its improbable rebirth.

Total consumption (album sales + singles sales + streams) is up 9.9% from this time a year ago. The bulk of that consumption is via streaming, which has grown a whopping 58.5% from 2016, to 179.8 billion.

Hip Hop led all genres in album and song consumption as well as audio streams (accounting for nearly a quarter of all streams).

Amongst artists, Drake led the pack in total consumption, with nearly 3m total album consumption units; Kendrick Lamar and Ed Sheeran lagged more than 800k behind. (Sheeran was, however, first in album sales with 823k). Drake paced in total streams with 3.8b.

Overall album sales dropped 13.9% compared to 2016 YTD, while digital album sales are down 24.3% from the previous year, and physical album sales have dropped 2.1%. The upshot is that digital downloads appear to be dying a faster death than physical sales, which accounted for 53.4% of all album sales so far this year, up from 46.9% at this point in 2016.

Yet vinyl is the creature that refuses to die. Sales of the format rose 20.4%, accounting for nearly 5% of all physical album sales. These numbers are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Read the entire list here. Happy crunching.