US industry body the RIAA has offered some stats from an upcoming last-decade report on the recorded music market in its homeland. Among them: the fact that streaming accounted for 80% of the market in 2019, up from a mere 7% in 2010. Over the same time period, paid streaming subscriptions grew from 1.5m to 61m by the middle of 2019. Separately, the BPI has published its year-end 2019 stats for the UK’s recorded music market, focusing on consumption of music. That was up by 7.5% year-on-year to the equivalent of 154m albums – a metric combining streams and sales – including 114bn audio music streams over 2019. That’s more than 25% growth from 2018’s figure of 91bn streams, although note the ‘audio’ element here: YouTube streams are not included in the total. Digital and physical album sales were down by 28.2% and 22.8% respectively last year in the UK. What all this means for actual music spending in the UK last year will be revealed tomorrow, in figures from the Entertainment Retailers Association.
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