For @nprmusic, I combed through the year- and decade-end music-data reports from Nielsen AND BuzzAngle, and parsed out the most interesting patterns/trends from both. Yes, we reached "1 trillion streams"—but there's much more going on beneath that number: npr.org/2020/01/14/796…
@nprmusic The major takeaways:
1) Audio streams might rule the U.S., but video streams rule the world.
US on-demand music streams in 2019 were ~70% audio, 30% video.
*Global* on-demand music streams in 2019 were ~70% video, 30% audio.
The ratio is completely flipped.
1) Audio streams might rule the U.S., but video streams rule the world.
US on-demand music streams in 2019 were ~70% audio, 30% video.
*Global* on-demand music streams in 2019 were ~70% video, 30% audio.
The ratio is completely flipped.
@nprmusic 2) While more songs are taking part in the "top 1%" of the industry—31 songs were streamed >500M times in 2019, up from 21 in 2018—power distribution has not changed. UMG still commands 38% of the market and the 1000 most-streamed songs in 2019 accounted for 18% of *all* streams.
@nprmusic 3) This is important: In terms of units, vinyl is NOT the top physical music format! ~80% of physical albums sold in 2019 were still CDs, not vinyl records. While vinyl might seem hot right now and makes around the same *revenue* as CDs, it has nowhere near the same *reach*.
@nprmusic 4) Radio charts paint a totally different picture of popularity from streaming: In the 2010s, rappers accounted for half of the top ten artists/songs for on-demand streams, but for *zero* of the top ten artists/songs by radio airplay. The latter is dominated by country and rock.
@nprmusic 5) The same popularity gap exists for streaming vs. album sales. Case in point: Adele has the No. 1 *and* No. 2 best-selling albums of the decade (21 and 25, respectively), but is literally nowhere to be found on any top streaming charts in either BuzzAngle's or Nielsen's report.
@nprmusic 6) Disappointingly, with the exception of pop, there's still a serious gender imbalance in the upper echelon of the industry. For 2019, all of the top-consumed hip-hop songs/albums were performed by men, and not a single woman made it onto Nielsen's top country or rock charts.
@nprmusic 7) Fun fact: Billie Eilish has a much more solid track record in vinyl sales compared to her peers. In 2019, ~20–25% of physical album sales for "When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go" were vinyl (compared to 6% and 9% for the latest albums from Taylor Swift and Harry Styles).
@nprmusic All in all, while some of the data in these two reports shows signs of global transformation to come, a lot of the data actually reflects the music industry's stubborn *resistance* to change and how much more work we still have ahead of us with respect to innovation, equity, etc!
