Nielsen’s Mid-Year Report Shows Boost In Music Consumption

Music consumption is growing, according to the 2016 Nielsen Mid-Year U.S. Music Report for the period of Jan. 1 through June 30. Total consumption for the year, based on Albums plus Track Equivalent Albums (TEA) and Streaming Equivalent Albums (SEA), is up nine percent from last year.

The country genre accounted for 11.6 percent of total album sales, 13.1 percent of physical album sales, and 9.6 percent of digital albums sales. Chris Stapleton‘s Traveller album is one of 2016’s overall Top 10-selling projects (see charts below).

“In the past year we have seen a continued shift in the music industry from a buying model to a streaming model,” says David Bakula, SVP Industry Insights, Nielsen. “Streaming now makes up nearly 50% of the overall volume, while we continue to see declines in digital purchasing.”

For the first half of 2016, more than 209 billion songs were streamed on-demand, via audio and video platforms, representing a 59 percent increase over last year. Audio on-demand streams now make up 54 percent of total streams, while video is now 46 percent of the total. Audio has grown 97 percent over the first half of 2015, while Video has grown by 29 percent. This growth contributed to overall digital consumption (sales and streams) increasing 15 percent.

However, digital tracks sales were weak, down 24 percent compared to the first half of 2015. Overall album sales are down 14 percent, including an 18 percent decline in digital album sales. Physical album sales are down 10 percent, despite continued strength in sales of vinyl LPs, which are up 12 percent to 6.2 million units.

Rock music brought in the large share of sales volume taking 26.8 percent for total album+TEA+SEA, followed by R&B/hip-hop (22.6 percent), pop (14.5), country (8.4), Latin (5.0), electronic/dance (3.8), Christian/Gospel (3.0) and the classical and jazz categories (1.2 percent each).