Music Industry

Let’s wrap up Canadian music sales and streaming stats for 2020

Well, that’s convenient. The last chart week of 2020 ended at 11:59 pm December 31, 2020. Here’s the final look at music sales and streaming stats for the year beginning with the year-over-year figures.

  • Total album sales, down -33.8% for the year.
  • CD sales, -48.4%. Just 2,843,252 CDs were sold in Canada over the last 12 months.
  • Digital albums, -18.5%
  • Digital tracks, -25.9%
  • Vinyl LPs, -12.9%. Last year, 1,033,582 vinyl albums were sold. This year saw unit sales of 899,931.
  • On-demand audio streams, +16.1%. That translates to 96,858,513,224 streams for the year.

Now we can look at week-over-week sales where we can see the effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on Boxing Day sales/

  • Total album sales, -52.2%
  • CD sales, -73.8% (!!!)
  • Digital albums, -4.7%
  • Digital tracks, +24.2%
  • Vinyl LPs, -61.6%
  • On-demand audio streams, -10.7% (1.709 billion streams in the country last week)

Finally, as a wrap-up to 2020, here’s a look at total album sales by region.

  2019 2020 Difference
Atlantic 330,992 251,932-23.9%
New Brunswick 199,261 141,614-28.9%
Quebec 3,097,688 1,918,484-38.1%
Ontario 3,205,430 2,369,949-26.1%
Manitoba 303,883 198,404-34.7%
Saskatchewan 280,113 190,457-32.0%
Alberta 1,657,375 883,015-46.7%
British Columbia 1,274,532 899,392-29.4%

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 38011 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

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