On-demand streaming in the US rose by 45% during the first half of 2018 according to market researchers, Nielsen, in their Music Mid-Year Report. Total album equivalent consumption*, which includes physical and digital album sales, song sales and on-demand audio and video song streams are up 18% during the same period.
On-demand song streaming activity reached new milestones, with volumes surpassing 400 billion, offsetting declines in album and track sales. On-demand audio streaming volume was up 45%, having already exceeded 268 billion so far in 2018, and on-demand video streaming volume is up 35% year on year.
Drake and Post Malone had the highest volume of on-demand audio streams of any artists in the US, with 3.3 billion and 3.1 billion respectively, but higher album sales put Post Malone on top of all artists in total album equivalent consumption. During the six month period, Drake’s ‘God’s Plan was the top streamed on-demand song with more than 1.1 billion streams.
Drake shatters streaming recordEd Sheeran leads all pop artists so far this year, as his song ‘Perfect’” is the top pop single for streaming and radio airplay, while Imagine Dragons dominated the rock genre with three of the top five rock songs – ‘Thunder’, ‘Believer’, and ‘Whatever it Takes’.
Post Malone’s ‘Psycho’ was the No. 2 streamed song, with 576 million streams, while BlocBoy JB’s ‘Look Alive’ came in third with 543 million.
While streaming drove industry growth vinyl LP sales continued to enjoy a revival with a 19% gain in sales from the year earlier.
Digital downloads and physical CD sales continued their decline with a drop of 20% in CD sales and 22% and 27% falls in digital album and digital track sales respectively.
The Rise and Fall of the Compact Disc*The term ‘total album equivalent consumption’ in this report describes the number of physical and digital albums that were sold and the total number of album equivalent songs from downloads and song streaming volume.
