More Year-End Canadian Music Stats for 2017

While it’ll be a few more weeks before we get all the numbers from 2017, Nielsen Music has a few more statistics about how Canadians consumed music over the last twelve months. Here are some highlights.

• Overall consumption of albums, songs and streams grew 13.6%.
• Streaming was the big hero. On December 3, Canadian streaming passed 900 million streams/week for the first time. It won’t be long until we’re at a billion streams/week.
• The fastest growing music genre of the year was R&B and hip-hop with an 86% increase in streaming. This can largely be explained by the fact that young people are the big early adopters of music tech like streaming and that’s their music preference.
• Seven of the year’s 10 most-streamed artists in Canada were from R&B and hip-hop.
• The biggest single streaming artist? Ed Sheeran, thanks mostly to the song “Shape of You.”
• “Despacito” became the first Latin single in history to reach #1 in Canada.
• While there were no Justin Bieber albums in 2017, he collaborated on four top 5 songs this year.
• Six Canucks at #1 albums on the Canadian charts this year: The Weeknd, Drake, Arcade Fire, Shania Twain, Pierre Lapointe and Gord Downie.
• After Gord died, consumption of Tragically Hip music increased by 1,000% the following week.
• Vinyl sales were up for the seventh year in a row. Catalogue sales accounted for 59% of sales. In other words, old records are driving vinyl sales.

More stats as they become available.