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Streaming Now Officially the Number One Way We Listen to Music in America (pitchfork.com)

Posted by msmash on from the how-we-listen-to-music dept.

An anonymous reader writes: It's official: according to a new year-end report released by Nielsen, over the course of 2016, streaming became the primary mode of music consumption in the U.S. Overall on-demand audio streams surpassed 251 billion in 2016 -- a 76 percent increase that accounts for 38 percent of the entire music consumption market. Plus, "the on-demand audio streaming share [of total music consumption] has now surpassed total digital sales (digital albums + digital track equivalents) for the first time in history." Nielsen's data is in line with others' findings.

9 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. I'd listen to more of my purchased music... by Chmarr · · Score: 4, Informative

    ,,, but iTunes is an interface abomination.

    1. Re:I'd listen to more of my purchased music... by Chmarr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sounds like you were sharing passwords across accounts. Risky.

    2. Re:I'd listen to more of my purchased music... by npslider · · Score: 3

      I'll second that notion. Apple needs to return to it's roots of software that 'simply works'. I stopped using iTunes years ago.

  2. Why? by JustNiz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It boggles my mind why people are more prepared to keep paying for bandwidth and the associated problems such as connection dependencies, interstitial ads and increased battery usage, rather than just using local memory to store music.

    1. Re:Why? by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you have slightly wider musical tastes and want to listen to music legally, streaming can be a whole lot cheaper than buying hundreds of CD's.

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    2. Re:Why? by deadwill69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It boggles my mind why people are more prepared to keep paying for bandwidth and the associated problems such as connection dependencies, interstitial ads and increased battery usage, rather than just using local memory to store music.

      I have a few reasons this works for me. After spending almost 20 years building up a digital music library it boils down to time and money.

      Time: My first foray into this was ripping my own CD's and Napster. Napster for the one-of-songs from albums/cassettes/CD's that I lost long ago and felt no strong desire to re-purchase for the one song I liked. CD's were a major pain. I ripped some 1200 of them on 1x to 4x burners. (I still have the manual for the 1x Tascam in the basement. Probably have to old Tascam too) Took a year. Then format's got better. Re-rip at 12x. And again a few years later on many of them at 20x. I managed to amass a collect of over 600,000 mp3, mp4, Wav, and other files. Then I went through and re-imported to get back to higher quality mp3s and get rid of all the separate formats. Keeping it clean, readable, searchable was a part-time job. CDDB didn't exsist and all of this was manually entered. Hell, I'm sure there's a large amount of this data dumped into CDDB after it finally came about.

      Then their is the whole mess of players. When I started there was only WinAmp that could handle more than 8 or 10k songs in a library. Then came iTunes and somewhere around there AOL bought WinAmp. They could handle 100k with ease and was quite a nice interface at the time (I still have an old mac 8600 with iTunes 1.1 on it and it still runs great). As time went on, new players came and went. Export library, import to the next or just start from scratch and wait days for my library to import. No fun going days with out music while your waiting for your library to import. Again. Or computer dies and you start over. iTunes still is the only player that reliably will load my library. (I've done VLC-not very user friendly last I tried, xbox- just sucks, XMBC, etc) All the major and some of the minor just can't handle over 20 or 30 k reliably last I tried and very few had/have the functionality of iTunes. (It's been a few years now since I tried last) So now, I have a computer in my stereo that is dedicated to only music. It runs iTunes, but I now have a wife and kids. This means I don't have the time to devote to maintenance or much else. I could turn the machine on and fire up player of choice that loads 600k songs, but it's just easier to launch Pandora Free (I'll do adds if you don't charge) or youtube and hit a playlist. It takes 3 seconds and I can be ensured a relative easy evening of musical pleasure. Then add on the continuing cost of keeping your collection updated with the latest music you do like. This is an ongoing task that just seems like more work.

      It's like owning a home, at some point you pay someone else to do the things that no longer make financial sense or you don't want to do anymore. I still don't mind yard work, but I'll call a roofer in a second. It's not worth my time to maintain a music library for regular consumption, so I let someone else do it for me. As for mobile, I read books or listen to the radio. I'm quite comfortable with radio hell and it gives me something to bitch about later.

      Will

      Ps. I hate iTunes and have since abandon Macs except for my historical machines that are mostly for sentimental reasons than anything else. Oh nostalgia!

  3. How long until FM Broadcast drops off? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm one of the few diehards that likes to listen to FM radio because its simple, couple buttons to press in the car and someone else chooses the music. I'll put up with ads for that.

    Guess I'll have to give in at some point and stream my favorite stations over cellular data/4G LTE with a device that can then get the sound into my car stereo somehow.(my current car has an AUX in 3.5mm jack which is handy, but now everyone is deleting the analogue audio jacks from phones lol) which seems kinda somewhat more complicated!

    What is everyone else doing?

  4. Stats by darkain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Curious to know how they obtain these stats. I personally use a local music library that is played through Foobar2000, so most likely not being tracked at all. And I know I'm not alone in this, either. There are plenty of us NOT using the latest and greatest tracking technologies in our every day lives to do the things we've always been able to do anyways without said tracking technologies, so how do we figure into the stats while simultaneously not being tracked?

  5. Headline is clickbait BS by GrumpySteen · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Nielsen report says nothing about how people listen to music. The report is about how people directly pay for music (either through streaming subscriptions or more traditional sales) and does not include radio (the audience isn't paying a direct fee for those, after all) or any other form of listening that isn't directly paid for by the listener.

    The only way the headline would ever be valid would be if people purchasing CDs and MP3s listened to them once and then destroyed them, which is almost never going to be the case.