There were numerous high-profile holdouts, and almost every single streaming service has repeatedly come under fire for the dismal royalty rates paid to content creators, but it would seem that the streaming subscription model has finally proven successful, with a 124% rise in subscribers, accounting for 76% of all streams in 2016. Even The Black Keys are now on board.
Is piracy dead? Well, no. But streaming has put a massive dent in illegal downloads, proving true the adage that people will pay for music if you make it easy, and worth their while.
Data-tracker BuzzAngle notes that it also hampered legal downloads, which were down 24.8% from 2015. The most shocking statistic that comes from BuzzAngle’s findings is that more songs were streamed on an average day in 2016, than were downloaded during the entire year! An average day saw 1.2 billion streams, whereas only 734 songs were downloaded.
The most-streamed song of the year was Desiigner’s earworm ‘Panda’, with almost 737 million streams, while Drake was the most-streamed artist overall.
The future is now – although 2016 did also see vinyl sales hit a 25-year high.
