BUZZANGLE: MUSIC CONSUMPTION UP FOR THIRD YEAR STRAIGHT

For a third consecutive year, overall music consumption grew—this time by 12.8%—according to data compiled by BuzzAngle. Obviously, streaming was the key factor in the boost as the number of streams approached 400 billion in 2017.

Music streams were up 50% over 2016 to 377b streams. Subscription streams represent 80% of total audio streams.

With a daily average of 1.67b streams, there were more than twice as many streams on any given day during 2017 then there were song downloads for the year, 563.7 million. Album sales were down 14.6%; song sales dipped 23.2%. Taylor Swift’s reputation (BMLG) was the top digital seller with 866k digital sales.

Vinyl was the bright spot in the sales department, rising 20% over 2016 and accounting for 10% of all physical album sales. Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix V. 1 (Disney) was the #1 seller with 65k sales.

Highlights from the streaming world include:

16 songs that were streamed more than 500m times in 2017, compared to six in 2016 and two in 2015;

383 songs that streamed more than 100m times in 2017 compared to 226 songs in 2016 and 111 songs in 2015; and

50% of the top 1,000 streamed songs were Urban songs—Rap/Hip-Hop at 40% and R&B at 10%.

The top titles: Despacito by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee the most streamed song of the year, becoming the first song to top 1b streams; Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” was the most audio-streamed song with more than 555.2m streams; and Drake was the most streamed artist with 6b streams.

Only two albums broke 1m pure album sales mark: Swift’s reputation with 1.9m sales and Ed Sheeran’s ÷ (Atlantic) with 1.1m sales.

Among genres, Rock was #1 in album consumption with 22.2% followed by Rap/Hip Hop (17.5%) and Pop (17.2%). Hip-Hop/Rap led the way in song consumption with 20.9% followed by Rock with a 19.8% share.

Oldies continue to be goodies: Deep Catalog titles, those released more than three years ago, accounted for 51% of all album sales in 2017 and 54% for physical album sales. For vinyl sales that figure jumps to 63% and for video streams, it is 59%.

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