The RIAA has released their year-end report for 2018:
Revenues from streaming music platforms grew 30% year-over-year to reach $7.4 billion, contributing 75% of total revenues for 2018, and accounting for virtually all the revenue growth for the year.
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.
Every song on Twenty One Pilots’ Blurryface has now been certified by the RIAA. This is now the first album in the digital era to have this distinction. The press release can be found below.
Read More “Every Song on Twenty One Pilots’ ‘Blurryface’ Has Been RIAA Certified”
Mayday Parade’s A Lesson In Romantics has been certified gold by the RIAA.
My Chemical Romance’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys has been certified gold.
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.
Jay-Z’s new album, 4:44, has already been certified platinum by the RIAA.
Panic! at the Disco’s song “Death of a Bachelor” has gone platinum.
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.
The RIAA has announced that they will be counting streams as part of certifying albums and singles Gold or Platinum:
After a comprehensive analysis of a variety of factors – including streaming and download consumption patterns and historical impact on the program – and also consultation with a myriad of industry colleagues, the RIAA set the new Album Award formula of 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams = 10 track sales = 1 album sale. Also effective today, RIAA’s Digital Single Award ratio will be updated from 100 on-demand streams = 1 download to 150 on-demand streams = 1 download to reflect streaming’s enormous growth in the two plus years since that ratio was set.
I think this move was inevitable. There’s a good chance that in our lifetime album “sales” will be rendered irrelevant. The full press release can be found below.
