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Streaming Now Officially the Number One Way We Listen to Music in America (pitchfork.com)
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.
,,, but iTunes is an interface abomination.
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'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?
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?
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.