Now that we’re into a new year, the recorded music industry is evaluating the last 12 months.
Breaking that down further, we consumed 93.2 million albums. If we look at individual songs, the number is 89.8 million.More and more people are adopting streaming as their primary source of music. Streaming activity was up about 13.4 per cent from 2021 with the annual number of on-demand audio streams of music hitting 100 billion for the first time. That’s below the global increase of 22.6 per cent , but still quite healthy.
It is possible, however, that some quarters of the population will continue to rediscover the joys of owning a hard copy of an album — a hard copy that costs substantially less than vinyl.Speaking of which, vinyl is fine. Mostly In music industry parlance, “catalogue music” is anything older than two years. With the ability to choose from about 100 million songs right from your phone, people are obviously going further afield with their musical explorations. Catalogue songs ate up 72 per cent of our consumption in 2022, an increase of 16 per cent over the previous year. Some are debating if this is a judgment about the quality of current music.