Music Sales 2021 Year End Report

Streaming Music Continues to Dominate – Vinyl Sales Soar

The tallies are in for music sales and digital streaming stats for 2021 and there are some surprises in the reports.

Not surprisingly, according to the music industry data-collecting firm MRC, “Audio on-demand streaming reached a new single-year high of 988.1 billion streams in 2021 (up 12.7% from 877.2 billion in 2020)…

However some interesting and significant changes in the way people world-wide are consuming music were noted.

2021 saw for the first time a marked decline (-4.9%) of “Current” music streams (new releases) while “Catalog” streams (music released more than eighteen months prior to 2021) boasted a 22.3% increase over the previous year. Some analysts speculate that the stay-at-home trend during the pandemic period may have led listeners to dive deeper into the offerings of their favorite artists while at the same time discovering “new” old music.

Perhaps a surprise is that CD sales are not dead by any means (40.6 million albums reportedly sold), showing a slight increase over 2020 sales of 40.2. million.

The real eye-opener however is the dramatic increase in vinyl record sales.

For the first time since MRC began compiling sales data in 1991, “vinyl surpassed CDs as the most-sold physical format,” coming in at an impressive 2021 total of 41.7 million vinyl LPs sold.

As has been quoted many times recently (in a different context!), “OK BOOMER!”

Ironically TikTok, not the go-to platform for Boomers, was named as an influence on younger consumers in discovering “classic” music.

Arguably, Record Store Day, founded in 2007 and now a huge international event, has helped propel the sales and popularity of vinyl.

MRC Data (formerly Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen Music Products) is a provider of music sales data. Established by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett in 1991, data is collected weekly and made available every Sunday (for albums sales) and every Monday (for songs sales) to subscribers, which include record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV companies, and artist managers. It is the source of sales information for the Billboard music charts. — Wikipedia