- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 13,000
Streaming services are killing album and song sales, which is a no brainer, but Rolling Stone has the exact figures for 2018: while total on-demand music streams and audio on-demand streams shot up 35.4 and 42 percent respectively, album sales fell 18.2 percent from the previous year and song sales fell 28.8 percent. “Of all the music that U.S. fans listened to last year, 77 percent was through music-streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.”
Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they’re coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales — compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year’s sales into even sharper relief.
Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they’re coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales — compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year’s sales into even sharper relief.