In 2019, music streaming plays reached an all time high, reaching 1.15 trillion.
In today’s day and age, vinyl records and CD’s are growing increasingly redundant, as music streaming becomes the innovative new way for audiences to reach their favourite artist’s new releases and reminisce about their legendary previous albums. Audio streams alone racked up an incredible $705.9 billion while video streams accumulated $304.1 billion. The art of streaming music has become the new normal for listening to music, with curated playlists designed specifically for each subscriber and almost instant uploading to the platform, apps like Spotify and Apple music are dominating the music industry today. Accounting for 84.6% of total album consumption in the U.S., streaming platforms picked up the slack for the decrease in physical album sales.
The popularity of music streaming platforms has reached not only Gen Z and millennials but has been taken advantage of by older generations as well. With various options, whether you want to pay for your service with Apple Music and Tidal, or you want to simply listen to music for free, in the case of Pandora and Spotify, the promise of convenience is key to locking in consumers. With the increase of streaming consumers, the number of platforms has also increased. While they all offer similar plans, platforms such as YouTube and Amazon have hopped on the bandwagon and launched their own streaming apps, YouTube Music and Amazon Music.
It wasn’t just music that was streamed throughout the year: podcasts took a massive leap forward with a growth of more than 50% since the beginning of the year. 2019 came to an end with some of the biggest artists at the top of the streaming list, with names like Post Malone, Drake and Billie Eilish. Spotify went that extra mile and created personalized “wrapped” cards for each user to see what they’re most played songs were, just in case they wanted to give them a listen one more time before the year’s end.