With the amount of music streaming services that continue to launch and relaunch, it comes as no surprise that more Americans would rather stream their favorite songs than buy a digital copy or even the artist's entire album.
According to recent data from Nielsen, streaming songs has almost doubled in the U.S. in just half a year.
Data from the tracking period of Dec. 29, 2014 to June 28, 2015 shows that Americans streamed 135 billion songs and music videos in the first half of 2015, compared with the 70.3 billion in the same period a year earlier.
There has been a 92 percent increase in streaming songs, up 74 percent for a total of 58.6 billion. However, most interestingly, there was also a 109 percent increase in video streaming with a total of 76.6 billion in just six months.
While the data does not reveal what platform people are streaming videos from the most, the numbers must be music to YouTube's ear. It's important to add that music streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal also have the option to stream videos, as on-demand music videos continue to become easily accessible right from a person's favorite music app.
Taylor Swift's 1989 was crowned the top-selling album with 2.01 million overall copies sold, and was the second-biggest selling digital effort (645,000), followed by Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late, with over one million albums sold overall.
The data also reveals there were 160 million digital downloads of songs (a 10.4 percent decrease), with 116.1 million in total sales (a four percent decrease) in six months. This suggests that buying music isn't a dying practice but shows the trend of more people choosing to stream instead.
Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars' "Uptown Funk!" is the mid-year top digital song with close to five million digital downloads, followed by Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" with just over three million.
"Uptown Funk!" has the most streams for both audio and video, with 109.9 million in audio streams and 258.1 video streams.
The data reveals that there continues to be a growing demand for music streaming services.
Via: Billboard
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns | Flickr
