Music Sales Continue Slide As Streaming Soars, Nielsen Report Shows
Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen BDS has released their analysis of 2014 mid-year U.S. music sales airplay and streaming data for the 6-month period of December 30, 2013 through June 29, 2014. The data, collected from U.S. point-of-sale, radio airplay and music streaming, shows that in the first six months of 2014, sales of albums are down 14.9% vs. the first six months of 2013. Vinyl Album Sales and On-Demand streaming continue to show improvement with vinyl sales up by %40.4 and on-demand streaming up by 42% over the same period last year.
The data also shows that album sales, both physical and digital, continued to slide in the first half of 2014, with CD sales slipping by 19.6% and digital album sales declining by -11.6%.
The sale of individual tracks in digital formats fell as well, declining by 133 in the studied time period with a total of 68,220,000 million tracks sold.
“With On-Demand streams surpassing 70 billion songs in the first six months of 2014, streaming continues to be an increasingly significant portion of the music industry,” says David Bakula, SVP Nielsen Entertainment. “Streaming’s 42% year-over-year growth and Vinyl LP’s 40% increase over last year’s record-setting pace shows interest in buying and consuming music continues to be robust, with two very distinct segments of the industry expanding substantially.” – via CelebrityAccess
