Pandemic Slowed Growth of Music Streaming

The coronavirus has also cut into the growth of digital streaming, which slowed significantly after widespread stay-at-home orders went into effect in mid-March, The L-A Times reports.

That’s according to a new midyear report from Nielsen Music/MRC Data that says activity on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music began 2020 up 20.4% over 2019 — then ratcheted back to an increase of only 13.8% between March 13 and July 2 as listeners spent far less time in the car or at the gym.

Predictably, the slowdown was worse for sales of recorded music, especially in physical form: After starting out the year up 4.6%, physical album sales plummeted amid the pandemic to finish the first half of 2020 down 20.3%.

Even so, listeners streamed enough music between January and the beginning of July — the equivalent of 361.2 million albums, Nielsen says — that total audio consumption (of which streaming represents 85%) was up nearly 10 points over 2019 for the year so far.

Here are key takeaways from the report:

• As in recent years, hip-hop and R&B unquestionably dominate the streaming market, with nine of the 10 most-consumed artists (including Drake, the Weeknd and Lil Uzi Vert) coming from those genres. And the 10th? Billie Eilish, whose brand of moody, beat-based pop draws deeply from rap.
• Albums by men account for nine of the 10 titles on the list of 2020’s biggest records so far, with Eilish’s “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” the only album by a woman. Lil Baby’s “My Turn” is at No. 1 with a sales-and-streams equivalent of 1.47 million copies, followed not far behind by the Weeknd’s “After Hours” (1.42 million) and Lil Uzi Vert’s “Eternal Atake” (1.37 million).
• New rock acts are having trouble competing with the genre’s pioneers: So far, no album released in 2020 (or in 2019, for that matter) has outperformed greatest-hits collections by Queen, Elton John, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Journey.
• Kenny Rogers’ death on March 20 drove his classic songs “The Gambler” and “Islands in the Stream” to the top of the following week’s sales chart. Other artists whose songs grew in popularity after their deaths include John Prine and Bill Withers, both of whose streams went up more than 1,000%.
• In 2019, vinyl sales rung up on Record Store Day accounted for 11.2% of the format’s sales in the first half of the year. In 2020, the cancellation of the annual event (due to the pandemic) helped flatten vinyl’s growth by more than 30%.