The Canadian recorded music has a decent year in 2020
While the pandemic has caused havoc with musicians, venues, support staff, and other aspects of the business music, the part of the industry dealing with the distribution of music had done okay.
New figures from MRC Data/Billboard show that music consumption in Canada was up by 6.5 in 2020, pushed higher by a 16.1% increasing in streaming.
At the end of the year, 9.3 million Canadians subscribed to a streaming music service. That’s up from 7.8 million from February 2020.
If we look at total album equivalent (TEA, which says 1500 streams = the sale of one album), consumption reached 73.9 million units, which is up from 69.4 million in 2019. That’s even after bundled stream offers ended. For example, Rogers offered Spotify accounts with new mobile phones for a while
Nice stuff–but these bigger numbers don’t necessary mean higher revenues. And it doesn’t even begin to dent the financial disaster that’s beset live music.
More on Canada’s music scene here.