The year-end numbers are in. How did the Canadian recorded music industry do in 2022?

[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]

Now that we’re into a new year, the recorded music industry is evaluating the last 12 months.

Luminate (formerly Nielsen) is the company that monitors all the music Canadians buy and listen to, from streams to CDs to LPs to cassettes. Here are some highlights from 2022.

Total consumption of music was up.\

In the olden days, we measured music consumption by the number of albums sold combined with radio airplay. Now things have to be weighted between sales, TEAs (track-equivalent albums, where 10 paid downloads equal the sale of one album), and SEAs (stream-equivalent albums, where 1,250 premium audio streams, 3,759 ad-supported audio streams, and 3,750 video streams equal one physical album). Add everything together and Canadians consumed 11.2 per cent more music in 2022 than we did in 2021.

Breaking that down further, we consumed 93.2 million albums. If we look at individual songs, the number is 89.8 million.

For all the numbers, go here.