The streaming music industry continues to grow, with new data from Nielsen indicating that music streams in the United States alone crossed one trillion in 2019. With that increase, streaming services accounted for 82% of music consumption in the United States.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, one trillion music streams is an increase of 30% year-over-year, with 2019 marking the first time the streams have crossed the the trillion threshold. The increase was fueled by a combination of growth by services like Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube, as well as big releases from artists like Taylor Swift.
On an industry-wide basis, streaming services accounted for 82% of music consumption in the United States last year. Physical album sales fell 19% during the year, and now make up for just 9% of total consumption. The Nielsen data also indicates that hip-hop was the biggest genre for the year with a 28% share of listening, followed by rock and pop at 20% and 14% respectively.
Post Malone was the biggest artist of 2019 when you combine sales and streams, with Drake, Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande rounding out the top 5. Drake was the most streamed artist of the year.
Apple is rather cagey with specific details about Apple Music. For instance, the company doesn’t report regular data on the number of users the service has. Last June, Eddy Cue confirmed that Apple Music at the time had over 60 million paying users, but did not go into detail on any other metrics and has not offered an update since then.
A report last year also suggested that Apple Music had surpassed Spotify in the United States in paid subscribers. Spotify is still believed to have an overall larger user base when you account for non-paying users, though.
Read more:
- WSJ: Apple Music surpasses Spotify in US with 28 million subscribers, ahead by 2 million and growing
- Eddy Cue confirms 60M paying Apple Music users, explains the death of iTunes
- Did you sign up for Apple Music over the holidays? Check out these tips
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