Over the course of the decade, streaming has surpassed both digital downloads and physical products 🎼 , now accounting for 80% of the market. #RIAAMusicData pic.twitter.com/q04FeQBT5a
— RIAA (@RIAA) December 30, 2019
Spotify landed in the US in 2011 and Apple Music debuted in 2014. There are many other streaming options around, including Tidal, Pandora, YouTube Music and Amazon Prime Music to name a few. Around 81 percent of Americans now have a smartphone, compared with about 35 percent in 2010. Since it’s much easier to use a streaming service than buy digital albums or load MP3s onto a phone (or carry around a separate music player), smartphone adoption has played a key role in the streaming shift.
In 2010, physical sales accounted for 52 percent of the US music market and digital sales 38 percent. Both are now down to a nine percent share. The market share of synch (i.e. licensing music for use in other media) hasn’t changed over the last nine years at three percent. But while people aren’t buying CDs so much anymore, vinyl’s back on the up. Sales rose from a little over $50 million in 2009 to almost $450 million in 2018.
What was once considered a classic format of listening to music, has made a resurgence. Vinyl 🎶 album sales continue to grow. ⬆️ #RIAAMusicData pic.twitter.com/SIo7f4NKdD
— RIAA (@RIAA) December 30, 2019
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift (who famously pulled her music from Spotify for a while), Adele and Drake claimed eight of the top ten selling albums of the decade between them. It’s not quite clear how their sales figures break down between streams and digital/physical album sales. However, given some of their songs have hundreds of millions of plays on various services, streaming certainly played an important factor.
