When Apple introduced iTunes back in the day, it changed the way many people consumed their music. Customers could now choose to pay for individual songs as opposed to having to buy an entire album, thus giving them more flexibility in choosing what they want to listen to. However it seems that those days are slowly leaving us.
According to a recent report from Nielsen, it has shown that streaming the past year has actually doubled since 2014. This represents a whopping 135 billion songs and videos users have streamed in the past year, and this only accounts for users in America, so we can only imagine that number must be even bigger when taking into account overseas markets.
As for digital downloads, that has actually seen a decline of 10.4% to 531.6 million. This number is still massive and represents a lot of revenue for the labels and publishers, but it is not what it used to be. Nielsen’s report also revealed that in terms of album sales which includes physical CD sales and digital albums, that number has also fallen by 4% to 116 million units sold.
According to Dave Bakula who is the SVP of Nielsen Entertainment, he told the folks at Re/code, “Obviously, the streaming piece is really great news, when you’re talking about darn near 100 percent growth … with no new players.” Now with the launch of Apple Music, we wonder how those numbers will be affected.