Streaming consumption hit a new record in the US last year. These are BIG numbers.

BuzzAngle, a company that keeps an eye on what we listen to and watch, has released their final report for the US for 2019. Take a look at some of these numbers.

• On-demand streams (audio and video) exceeded 1 trillion last year. Of that, about 705 billion were for music.
• If you dig into that figure, overall album consumption (using the formula album sales + song sales + streams) hit 795.9 million (i.e. the number of albums sold in the old days.)
• Individual song consumption was 7 billion (i.e. the number of single sold in the old days. That’s a lot of songs.)
• The biggest artist of the year in the US was Post Malone with 4.4 million album consumption units (i.e. what would have been a quadruple platinum album in the old days).
• Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding sold 2 million copies. That’s straight sales. No one sold more.
• Malone was the most-streamed artist with 6.7 on-demand streams. Drake was second with 6.3 billion and Billie Eilish was third with 5 billion.
• The most-consumed song in American in 2019? “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. No surprise there, really. It was streamed more than 1.8 billion times and was the only single to sell more than 1 million units.
• Last year, 31 songs streamed more than 500 million times. That’s up from 21 the year before. And another 897 songs streamed more than a 100 million times.
• Album sales accounted for just 12% of all music consumed in the US last year. That’s down from 17% in 2018. Meanwhile, vinyl albums accounted for 19.2%. (Whaaa? The biggest-selling vinyl album in the US in 2019 was When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go from Billie Eilish with 113,000 units.)
• The artist with the most vinyl sales? The Beatles with 244,000.

Here’s the fact that struck me the most: “The top 1,000 song sales accounted for 66 million sales, down 28% over 2018 song sales of 92.3 million. (170.9 million sales in 2017). The top 1,000 song sales in 2019 once again accounted for 22% of all song sales for the year.”

Translation: Streaming is being spread out to more than just songs in the top one thousand.

(Via a BuzzAngle email press release)