Hip-Hop Dominates U.S. Streaming, But Not Physical Sales

Here we look at some fascinating new data from market analyst BuzzAngle, revealing some interesting trends in America's music consumption habits. One thing at least is clear: hip hop reigns supreme when it comes to streaming, this year accounting for a quarter of all plays.

_________________________

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

According to the latest stats from market analyst BuzzAngle, hip-hop dominated US streaming last year with just over 25% of the total, up from 22% the year before. That figure was even higher when it came to Spotify and Apple Music, as the genre came there in at 26.9%.

That domination carried over to video streams as well, as hip-hop scored 22.8% of all music streams on YouTube.

Coming in second was pop at 18.5% and rock at 11.4% of audio streams, but things were a bit different when it came to YouTube streams. There pop registered 16.6% but latin hit 21.8%. That suggests that latin music fans haven’t adopted audio streaming yet and prefer to consume their music principally from YouTube.

When it came to buying physical product it was a different story however. Pop reigned supreme with 27.5% of the CD sales, while rock came in at 24.5%, and country at 16.6%. Hip-hop registered just 3.2% of CD sales, being surpassed by such genres like Stage & Screen and Religious.

Album sales were down again last year by 18.2%, but this is an area that rock dominated with 26.6% of the sales, closely followed by pop at 26.3%. Country was a distant third at 12.9%. Hip-hip scored only 5.2% of total US CD sales.

The biggest sales artists for physical product in the US last year? That hot new group from Liverpool – The Beatles!

What’s astounding is there were 534.62 billion on-demand audio streams in the US last year, which was up a whopping 41.8%. Music video streams were up 24.3% to 274.88 billion.

BuzzAngle’s report is a fascinating look at the music business in the United States last year. Even though hip-hop was the king of streaming, there was a lot of other business going on and other genres led in many of those areas.

The trends are telling us that streaming will continue to grow in 2019, while album and CD sales will continue to decrease.