2014 was very good for vinyl, and streaming
Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ melted ‘Frozen’ for top album
Physical music sales were down in 2014, but on-demand streaming and vinyl sales boomed.
Overall on-demand audio and video streams from services such as Spotify grew 54%, from 106 billion in 2013 to 164 billion in 2014, end-of-year data from Nielsen Music show. Sales of vinyl albums rose 52%, from 6.1 million in 2013 to 9.2 million in 2014.
Overall album sales dropped by 11%, from 289.4 million in 2013 to 257 million last year.
Taylor Swift, who didn’t allow new album 1989 to be streamed, saw it become the year’s bestselling title, its 3.661 million copies edging out Disney’s Frozen soundtrack, which sold 3.527 million in 2014.
Here are some more takeaways from Nielsen Music’s data, released last week:
The 9.2 million vinyl sales were the most since 1991, when SoundScan began tracking sales. But they still account for just 6% of all physical album sales, and 3.5% of all album sales when digital albums are included.
If you were to apply the same methodology Billboard now uses when compiling The Bill
board 200 albums chart — that 1,500 streams is the equivalent of a single album sold — the 164 billion on-demand streams would be the equivalent of an additional 109 million album “sales.”
Streaming may soon become the preferred way of consuming music, but acts that give their fans creative reasons to own physical product — whether that’s Jack White, whose Lazaretto be- came the year’s top-selling vinyl product by including hidden tracks that played at different speeds, or Taylor Swift with her multiple Polaroid-photo packs in
1989 CDs — can still be rewarded.
Swift sold more downloads of 1989 than 2014’s second-biggest release, Sam Smith’s In the
Lonely Hour, sold in physical and digital combined. Swift and Smith were the only two acts who had top-10 sellers on both the albums and digital songs lists. Ed Sheeran’s X, Coldplay’s Ghost Stories and J. Cole’s
2014 Forest Hills Drive were among the 10 top digital sellers. Barbra Streisand’s Partners, One Direction’s Four and Eric Church’s The Outsiders made the overall top 10 but not the digital list. Only four albums (1989; Frozen, released in 2013; In the Lonely Hour; and Pentatonix’s That’s
Christmas to Me) sold more than 1 million copies in 2014. Pentatonix’s Christmas album sold more than its four previous releases combined; the a cappella group’s next album is due in late spring.