Here’s our weekly checkup on the health of Canadian music sales and streams
That this year will be a bust for the music industry has long been a given. But are there any bright spots to be found amount the data? Let’s find out.
The year-over-year data gathered by Nielsen Music Canada is disastrous:
- Total album sales are 38.4% lower than they were at this point in 2019.
- CDs are down by a whopping 53.6%.
- Digital albums are softer by 21.4%
- Digital tracks are down by 26.6%
- Vinyl is off by 26.0%
- On-demand audio streams are up 19.1% (1.903 billion streams in the country last week, which I think is a new all-time high).
But drilling down to week-to-week data, we find this:
- Total album sales are up 1.6%
- CDs moved ahead 5.5% from the previous week
- Digital albums are up slightly (+0.5%)
- Digital tracks moved up 4.6% in the last seven days.
- Vinyl is down 4.7%
- On-demand audio streams are essentially flat (+0.2%)
Alberta remains the hardest-hit province when it come to music sales (down -50.3% from last year).
