Despite its grapples with the music industry, YouTube has long been the biggest music streaming destination in the world — until now. A boom in subscriptions to services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play in 2016 has meant that on-demand audio platforms have officially overtaken digital video music streamers (including YouTube and Vevo), according to The Drum, which cited a report from music industry monitoring company BuzzAngle.
That report, which can be viewed in full right here, states that while digital video music streams grew 7.5% year-over-year to 181 billion total plays in 2016, audio on-demand services increased by a whopping 83% to 251 billion total streams.
And this growth is being driven largely by paid-for apps like Apple Music, reports The Drum
, which were responsible for a 124% increase in plays over the past year. Ad-supported services, such as Spotify’s free offering, only accounted for a 14% increase in plays.Other findings from BuzzAngle’s inaugural Music 2016 U.S. Report 2016 include the fact that overall music consumption was up 4.2% from 2015 — marking the second straight year of overall growth. While physical album sales saw a 12% drop, vinyl record sales were up 25.9%. And the rapper Drake had the most popular album of the year, according to BuzzAngle, with Views.
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