Stay Streamin'

19 February 2018

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BuzzAngle (note: no relation to BuzzFeed), a website reporting on music consumption, published a 2017 year-end report which announced that the number of subscription streams increased from 76% in 2016 to 80% in total audio streams this past year.

It's no surprise that music streaming platforms have become more popular in the last decade since Spotify hit the scene in 2008. However, the use of these platforms has truly grown in its largest numbers in the past three years — the exact amount of time that Apple Music has been an available streaming service. In 2017 alone, researchers at BuzzAngle reported that Americans consumed 377 billion streams. Impressive.

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However, we're primarily consuming tracks that the streaming platforms are promoting for us. Of the 377 billion total streams in 2017, 99% were from the top 10% of the year’s most-streamed tracks. That means the remaining 1% of the total consisted of all the other music out there-- indie tracks, small EDM artists, and so on.

No matter the media– film, television, or music– streaming is here to stay. There's no reason to fight it, unless, of course, something else comes along.