STREAMING PIE
Streaming music services are not so much on the rise as already completely dominant, at least so far as music industry income goes. Official RIAA numbers for the United States in the first half of 2018 have streaming accounting for a massive 75% of music industry revenues (see the chart), digital downloads for another 12%, and all physical formats combined just 10%. The RIAA figures show shipments of physical products decreasing 25% in the first half of the year, with revenues from CDs falling by a massive 41%, more than offsetting a 13% increase in revenues from sales of vinyl albums.
The more recent BuzzAngle report for the full 2018 year shows that even digital album sales are falling in the face of subscriptions, down 21.8% on 2017, and it confirms the fall in physical media, down 15.3% on 2017, though vinyl rose 11.9% and cassettes up 18.9% — yes, they’re back, though still tiny at 0.2% of physical sales (118k total units in the US) compared with 13.7% (9.7m units) for vinyl and 86.1% (60.7m units) for CD, bearing in mind that vinyl costs more than CDs in most cases. And here’s a frightening stat from BuzzAngle — hip-hop/rap accounted for 21.7% of all album consumption, beating pop (20.1%) and rock (14%). Jazz scored 1.1%, and classical recordings just 1%, which was slightly below, er, reggae. JF