#soundscan

People still buy albums. Taylor Swift fans, mostly. But still. 100 million physical and digital albums sold is not nothing. And Swift is responsible for 3% of those: 1,818,000 copies of Midnights (945,000 of those on vinyl!) and at least another 1.1 million more across her catalog. Vinyl outsold CDs again, but its growth curve is leveling off, perhaps due to maxing out the existing pressing…

Data: 2021 Total Music Sales and Streams

The big news from the 2021 year-end report (if you’re a dork like me) is that vinyl finally surpassed compact discs as the most-sold physical format for the first time in the Soundscan era (i.e., since 1991). Still though, people bought over forty million CDs — nuts! Also, total album sales (physical + digital) actually went up a little bit for the first time since a little blurp in 2011. Other…

Data: 2020 Total Music Sales and Streams

Streams are up, sales are down. Except for vinyl, which is up again for the sixteenth year in a row (but still less than the trusty old compact disc). The industry will try to convince you that “music consumption” is up, and maybe it is, but those calculations are squishy at best. Especially when they change their formulas every year. This year, Billboard is not using total music streams…

2019 Soundscan Data: Total Music Sales and Streams

Don’t believe the hype. You might hear that “album consumption” grew 15% but that’s an arbitrary measurement made up by the industry and tweaked every other year to make business look healthy. The indisputable fact is that people are purchasing fewer albums than ever, and an top of that, nobody’s even measuring how many albums people are actually listening to.

Yes, they track streams. And streams…