Report: Country Music Streaming Surges

Music sales information provider MRC Data (formerly Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen Music Products) has recently released a joint survey recapping 2021 with Billboard's aid. Alongside revealing year-end chart-toppers and music consumption for the past calendar year, it also showcased country music's streaming-aided surge as a top overall musical genre. 

Notably, Morgan Wallen's Dangerous: The Double Album expanded country music's decade-plus long grip as the industry's leader as an album-oriented genre. Wallen's January 8-released, 30-track album — driven by the singles "More Than My Hometown," "7 Summers," and "Sand in My Boots" — closed the year, having earned 3.2 million album-equivalent units sold. This enabled it to be both 2021's top-selling country album and the most popular album across all genres.

In addition, the ten weeks that the album spent at No. 1 was the most weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's all-genre Top 200 chart for a country album since Taylor Swift's Fearless spent 11 weeks on top in 2008-09.

As far as success within country itself, Walker Hayes' ode to the joys of simple living "Fancy Like" and Luke Combs' anthemic marital ballad "Forever After All" achieved Nos. 1 and 2 as country's best-selling songs of the year. Moreover, as far as radio airplay is concerned, Gabby Barrett's nearly two-year-old pop-crossover hit "I Hope" was 2021's most popular country song and performed well across multiple radio formats.

Digging deeper into the research, country music's late arrival to the streaming table has finally begun to factor deeply into MRC/Billboard data. Seven years have passed since Billboard started to weigh its sales charts more heavily towards the growing use of digital service providers like Spotify and Apple Music for streaming music. MRC's report notes that audio on-demand streaming reached nearly one trillion streams in 2021 — an about 13% increase from 2020. Plus, the report adds that "over 175 songs that trended on TikTok (where songs like Walker Hayes' "Fancy Like" first gained popularity) ended up charting on the Billboard Hot 100, more than twice the amount in 2020."

Though country lags behind K-pop and Afrobeats in global popularity growth, it's a stateside "overperformer" in 174 of the 211 markets MRC measures in the United States. The genre is equally popular in both cities like Nashville and Omaha and numerous smaller Midwest and Mountain markets.