Streaming continues to pull the music industry out of the doldrums.
Following last week’s report revealing that U.S. recorded music sales rose 11.4% in 2016 over the previous year due to increased streaming revenue, the Q1 music numbers show the trend continuing.
On-demand streaming for the first three months of 2017 tallied 133.9 billion streams, up 35.2% over the 99.1 billion streams for Q1 2016, according to Nielsen Music (via Billboard).
Just as with the 2016 year-end numbers, streaming numbers rose while digital downloads and physical sales continued to decline. Digital track sales decreased 23.8% from 207.9 million for Q1 2016 to 158.4 million.
The world continues to turn away from the album format as well: Total album sales for Q1 (combining physical and digital album sales) were 40.3 million, a 20% decline from 2016 Q1’s total of 50.7 million.
Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” featuring Lil Uzi Vert is the top on-demand streamed song for Q1, registering 464.7 billion audio and video streams. Ed Sheeran’s “÷" (pronounced Divide) is the top album for Q1, moving 1.1 million equivalent album units. Sheeran’s single, “Shape of You,” is the top-selling song with 1.58 million downloads and follows “Bad and Boujee” as the second most on-demand streamed song for Q1 at 378.9 billion.
For a reality check, though things are looking up, revenue is still far from what it was 20 years ago. For 2016, the music industry earned $7.65 billion, down from $13.7 million in 1998, which was the last year that the U.S. music industry saw a revenue increase in the double digits.
