A decade ago, “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha was the No. 1 song in the U.S., according to Billboard.
Today, popular app TikTok is a source for new music discovery and artist development.
The 2010s were a decade of transformation for music consumption, and new RIAA decade-end data shared on Twitter offers an eye-opening glimpse of the disintegration of music sales. Is there also an impact on the consumption of music radio?
According to Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) data made public Dec. 30, streaming surged from 7% in 2010 to an incredible 80% U.S. market composition in the first half of 2019.
By comparison, physical sales (namely, Compact Discs) plummeted from 52% in 2010 to 9% in the first half of ’19.
Similarly, digital downloads — once a shining star for Apple’s iTunes, commanding 25% market share — sank from 38% in 2010 to 9% through June 30, 2019.
The numbers solidify trends that present a new paradigm for music consumption in the 2020s: people are renting, rather than purchasing, recorded tunes for use across digital devices.
Yet, consumers are still forking over dollars to listen to their favorite music. Only, they aren’t buying MP3s, or CDs. Rather, they are paying for subscription services including Sirius XM’s Pandora, Spotify, or Amazon Music, among other offerings.
Paid streaming music subscriptions numbered 15 million in 2010. Through June 30, 2019, they numbered 61.1 million, with rapid growth accelerating through the latter half of the past decade.
As streaming has grown, radio industry experts argue that Spotify and Pandora have not taken audiophiles away from radio but instead replaced CD usage. With Nielsen Audio data showing radio’s reach exceptionally strong against other media, the RIAA data backs up this claim.
