Streaming is here to stay. If you’re fighting it, it’s a losing battle.
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
A year ago in this space, I wrote an article about how streaming is changing Canadians’ relationship with music. After noting that the country had passed the one billion streams/week milestone, the story ended with this line: “I have a feeling that if we were to revisit this column a year from now, all these numbers will appear laughably small.”
Time for an update.
Canadians now regularly stream well over a billion songs a week
According to Nielsen, the counter and tracker of these things, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime, and the rest of them served up 1.431 billion streams to Canadians last week. That represents a 40.2 per cent increase from the same period last year.
If we look at cumulative streams for the year to date, consumption is up 38.3 per cent to 18,876,550,522. Given the clip at which things are growing, we’ll hit the 20 billion mark this week.
And we love YouTube, too
YouTube is its own animal when it comes to music. On-demand video streaming has jumped 72.5 per cent since this time last year to about 428 million views per week.
Record labels love streaming more than ever
Remember when the recorded music industry was dead set against streaming? It spent years insisting that it stick to its 100-year-old business model of selling pieces of plastic to music fans. After more than a decade of disruption, it’s now all smiles.
