print
Everyone Is Doomed (Except Adele): The Cold, Hard Truth About The Nielsen Music Report
by BrainBurner

    Last week, Nielsen shared its 2015 U.S. Music Year-End Report, giving a massive statistical overview of how we consume music, how much music we consume, and how our consumption of music in 2015 differed from our consumption of music in 2014. The report was covered by just about every major publication in the world, and all those publications told a similar story about the report. Below, I have created a composite version of that story, using lines from a dozen different articles via a dozen different news organizations, cited Wikipedia style. I think it flows pretty well!

    “Contrary to popular belief among curmudgeons, the music industry as we know it isn’t totally down the toilet — at least not yet — and the numbers prove it.” [1] “2015 was a good year for streaming services, according to Nielsen’s year-end Music report out now.” [2] “Because of streaming’s ascent, the record business experienced an overall growth of 15.2 percent, from 476.9 million album consumption units in 2014 to to 549.4 million in 2015.” [3] “[S]treaming activity nearly doubled in 2015. On-demand audio and video streams on outlets like Spotify, YouTube and Apple Music — which, unlike radio services, allow users to pick exactly what songs to listen to — were up 93 percent, to 317.2 billion songs played.” [4]

    “The story of the year in the music industry should have been music streaming … But then along came Adele.” [5] “In the music business in 2015, there was Adele and then there was everybody else.” [6] “Adele’s 25 sold 8.01 million equivalent album units — a combination of traditional album sales and streaming equivalent albums — last year following its launch on Nov. 20. That number includes 7.44 million in traditional albums, a whopping number for the music industry.” [7]

    “25 was also the top seller in vinyl sales, a format which continues its renaissance. Vinyl sales were up 30 percent from 2014 and accounted for almost 9 percent of total physical album sales.” [8] “Nearly 12 million vinyl units sold this year, making 2015 the 10th straight year of growth.” [9]

    “[The report] contained bad news, too. Both album and individual track sales declined again.” [10] “Digital track sales suffered the biggest drop (12.5 percent) but physical album sales (8.3 percent), and digital album sales (2.9 percent), also continued their descent.” [11] “However, the sheer volume of streams appears to at least partly make up for the shortfall — Billboard notes that the revenue is equivalent to 211.5 million purchased albums. While artists aren’t necessarily getting all that extra money, it’s a positive sign.” [12]

    So anyway, if you saw this story anywhere, it probably looked a lot like that. And that doesn’t look too bad!

    But looks can be deceiving. And when I look at this report? I see an entirely different story than the one being told by everyone else. So I’m here to tell you my version.