RIAA Releases 2019 Mid-Year Report

The RIAA have released their mid-year report and vinyl sales are creeping up on CDs.

Net revenues from physical products bucked the recent trend in unit sales and grew 5% to $485 million in 1H 2019; however, this growth was the result of a reduction in physical product returns, and on a gross basis the revenues from physical product would have been down for the period. Vinyl albums grew 13% to $224 million, but still only accounted for 4% of total revenues in 1H 2019.

Streaming Accounts for 75% of Music Industry Revenue

The RIAA have released their mid-year revenue report for the music industry. Patricia Hernandez, writing at The Verge, has a good rundown:

Turns out, streaming makes more money than physical CDs, digital downloads, and licensing deals combined.

Streaming in this context includes paid subscriptions to services such as Spotify and Tidal, but also digital radio broadcasts and video streaming services such as VEVO. It’s a broad category that nonetheless has made $3.4 billion dollars in 2018 so far, a total that amounts to 75 percent of overall revenue for the record industry.

2017 Music Sales Are Up

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:

Music streaming is big, and getting bigger fast. Digital downloads are falling off a cliff.

Oh, and one more familiar refrain: The music industry loves the money it’s getting from subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music, but it wants YouTube to pay them much more. […]

More than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music business.

And that’s pushing the overall music business back up again, after a fall that started in 1999, with the ascent of Napster, and didn’t stop until a couple years ago. Retail sales were up 17 percent, to $4 billion, and wholesale shipments were up 14.6 percent, to $2.7 billion.

Streaming Music Surpasses Digital Downloads

The RIAA has released their report on the state of the US music industry in 2015. Streaming is now the biggest revenue source.

The U.S. recorded music industry continued its transition to more digital and more diverse revenue streams in 2015. Overall revenues in 2015 were up 0.9% to $7.0 billion at estimated retail value. The continued growth of revenues from streaming services offset declines in sales of digital downloads and physical product. And at wholesale value, the market was up 0.8% to $4.95 billion – the fifth consecutive year that the market has grown at wholesale value.