Vinyl Sales, Streaming Rise in 2017

Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island’s music outlet, takes a brief look at 2017 music sales

Late last week, both Nielsen and Buzzangle released their year-end reports on music sales in 2017. According to these services, music consumption has increased over the last year, benefitting mainly from audio streaming and vinyl sales.

Despite what the music industry might have you think, music consumption is on the rise. Buzzangle reports that total album consumption in 2017 is up 12.8% from 2016. Song consumption was even higher, rising 25.9% over the previous year. Ed Sheeran had the most-consumed album of the year with ‘÷,’ followed closely by Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation,’ which was the best-selling album of the year.

While consumption has increased, album sales were not the main factor for it. Album and song sales both continued to decline in 2017. According to Buzzangle, the decline was 14.6% for albums and 23.2% for song downloads over 2016. That especially goes for CD sales. Though they continue to make up the bulk of physical music sales, CDs were the only physical medium to show a decline over the last year.

There is a silver lining though. While physical album sales did decrease, the drop wasn’t as bad as it was in 2016. While there was an 11% decrease in 2016, 2017 only saw a 7% decrease in physical album sales according to Buzzangle. This could be due in part to the continued increase in vinyl sales. According to Nielsen, vinyl saw its 12^th consecutive year of sales growth, rising 9% over 2016. The medium made up 14% of all physical album sales in 2017, the highest Nielson has recorded it at since they started keeping records in 1991, and 8.5% of album sales in total. Buzzangle was even more generous, reporting that vinyl made a 20% leap over the previous year.

Vinyl wasn’t the only physical medium to grow in 2017. Surprisingly, cassette sales are at a high as well. Though they still make up a negligible part of album sales, only 0.1% according to Buzzangle, Nielsen reported that cassette sales had a 35% increase over 2016, putting them at a nine-year high.

When it came to physical album sales in 2017, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ came out on top. The film franchise’s first soundtrack came in at number one on Buzzangle’s list of top-selling vinyl albums and took the number 3 spot on Nielsen’s, just behind The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ reissue and their ‘Abbey Road’ album. As for cassettes, ‘Guardians’ holds the top three spots with the ‘Stranger Things’ soundtrack and Eminem’s ‘The Eminem Show’ reissue rounding out the top five.

While vinyl and cassettes had an outstanding year, the main reason for 2017’s increase in music consumption was audio streaming. Both Nielsen and Buzzangle recorded more than 50% increases in on-demand streaming between 2016 and 2017. And that’s not just free streams, but paid subscriptions as well. In fact, paid subscriptions eclipse ad-supported streams exponentially, proving that people are still paying to listen to music, just in a different way.

The music industry saw a lot of growth in 2017. Music consumption has been on the rise over the last year, due in large part to audio streaming hitting an all-time high. Even album sales didn’t fare too badly in 2017 especially if you look at the continuing increase in vinyl and cassette sales. Here’s to hoping 2018 is just as successful.

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Keep physical music mediums aliveby shopping Vinyl Bay 777 in 2018. Long Island’s favorite new independent record shop has thousands of titles to choose from in a wide variety of genres. Browse our selection of new and used vinyl records, CDs, cassette, music DVDs and memorabilia in store at our Plainview location or online at vinylbay777.com. With more titles being added to our selection all the time, you never know what you might find at Vinyl Bay 777.