Will 2016 be the year the music business truly recovers from the digital transition (as many Wall Street and other analysts are suggesting)?
BuzzAngle Music’s mid-year report suggests it might be. BuzzAngle's data for the first half of the year showed that online music consumption reached a critical watershed. For the first time, audio streams via services like Spotify and Apple exceeded the number of video streams via platforms like YouTube. BuzzAngle gathers data from retailers on and offline, as well as streaming platforms and other services, to track music consumption by market, genre, and type.
There was an overall growth of streams of 58% for the period, to around 209.4 billion streams. Of these, more than half were audio streams, a category of music usage that showed 108% growth in the period.
This upswing in audio streams pushed music consumption upward by a not-too-shabby 6.5%, despite continued declines in physical album sales. Those declines have slowed, thanks in part to the vinyl resurgence, and for the period came to 9%.