It’s been the talk around the industry water cooler for some time that digital streaming via services like Spotify and Pandora has been slowly cannibalising the revenue that was once flooding into the pockets of digital music sales platforms like iTunes, but now we have the numbers to prove it.
As the Financial Times reports, sales of music downloads in the UK and the US fell considerably during 2014, as more and more consumers switched from buying songs to streaming them. In the US alone, sales of digital albums dipped by 9 percent, with 12 percent fewer digital songs sold during the year.
By contrast, US audio and video streaming managed to see an increase of more than 50 percent, with 164 billion song streams occurring between January and December 2014. The US figures, provided by Nielsen Music Data, also showed further growth for vinyl, with sales soaring by more than 50 percent.
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Meanwhile, over in the UK, download sales fell for the first time ever, bringing an end to a strong period of consistent growth that began with the launch of iTunes just over a decade ago. According to NME, download sales fell by 15 percent in 2014. The decline was three times faster than physical formats such as vinyl and CD.
According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), 30 million albums were downloaded in 2014, down from 32.6 million a year ago, while the retail value of subscriptions to streaming surfaces managed to surge by 65 percent to £175 million. Streaming now accounts for 12.6 percent of all music consumed in the UK, with 2014 seeing more than 14.8 billion song streams.
As the Financial Times notes, the rapid shift highlights the ongoing changes in the digital music market, with many pundits now touting streaming as the inarguable future of music distribution, best underscored by market-savvy tech giant Apple’s purchase of Beats Music in 2014.
