Annual BuzzAngle Report Recaps 2018 Music Consumption

Lagerhaus/WireImage/Getty Images – Drake
Drake performs at Qudos Bank Arena on Nov. 7, 2017 in Sydney, Australia.

On-demand streaming continued to drive growth in overall music consumption throughout 2018, according to BuzzAngle Music’s 2018 Year-End Report on U.S, Music Consumption, although the data also indicates the glory days of song and album sales may be gone for good.

The trend of streaming driving growth in consumption is nothing new, but BuzzAngle reported that 2018 has seen the landscape further solidify into a larger, but very different environment. Overall consumption grew by 16.2 percent over 2017, which in turn grew by 12.8 percent from 2016. Total album consumption was at 701 million units, with a total of 5.8 billion songs consumed. The latter is an increase from the 4.6 billion from last year.

The streaming numbers also featured greater parity, as there were only nine songs that broke the 500 million streams mark in 2018, down from 16 such songs the previous year. There was an increase in the number of songs that topped 100 million streams, with 417 this year, compared to 383 the previous year.

The top 50 titles this year were responsible for 11 percent of album sales but only 1 percent of audio streaming, meaning the playing field is wide. The Top 500 albums accounted for 30 percent of the album sales, but only 11 percent of the streams.

The big winner in the report’s awards category was Drake, who won Artist of the Year, Album of the Year for Scorpion, and Song of the Year for “God’s Plan,” amongst other trophies. Other winners include The Greatest Showman: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack as Top Album by Album Sales; Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 as Top Album By Vinyl Album Sales; The Beatles as Top Artist by Physical Album Sales; and the late XXXTentacion as Top Indie Artist by Total Consumption.

In tandem with Drake’s awards dominance, hip-hop was the biggest genre in total album consumption and song consumption, making up 21.7 percent of total overall consumption, and 92 percent of that was from on-demand streaming. As genres rock and pop tied for the leading percentage of album sales, with 26 percent each, but pop stood alone in the category of song sales, with 26 percent, trailed closely by hip-hop with 25 percent.  

Streaming showed growth in both its paid and free services as subscription streams (with paid accounts) grew by 50 percent in Q4 of 2018 compared with Q4 in 2017. Ad-supported streams (free services) grew 18.2 percent during the same period.

Album sales and song sales continued to decline in 2018, with the former down 18.2 percent on the year, and the latter down by 28.8 percent. Digital and physical sales were down overall, though legacy mediums like vinyl and cassettes were actually up.

The success of older formats ties in with the fact that the majority of content (just over 50 percent) is defined as “deep catalog,” meaning it is more than three years old. After that, 25 percent of annual music consumption was of material categorized as “recent,” meaning it was at least two months old, but less than a year-and-a-half old. Only 12 percent of material consumed was classified as “new,” or less than eight weeks old when purchased or streamed.

To learn more about BuzzAngle Music, which produces the Elite 100 Artists chart, click here.