Hip hop is the most popular genre in the US, making up 20% of streams

Audio streams in the United States were up 58.5% to a record high of 179.8 billion in the first six months of 2017.

In positive news for the music industry, a marked trend is that consumers are turning more to subscription audio streams on platforms as Spotify and Apple Music.

These skyrocketedby 69.3% to 141.3 billion units and now represent 78.6% of total audio streams.

Meanwhile, the free tier streams of ad-supported audio services hosted 38.5 billion units after a 28.4% rise from the first six months of 2016.

In addition, subscription audio play is fast leaving behind music streams on online video services such as YouTube. These had a minimal growth this year of just 6.1% and reached 101.5 billion – almost 40 billion behind paid-for streams.

The figures are from the regular mid-year report from market monitor BuzzAngle.

Total on-demand streams per week in the U.S. are now 10.8 billion. This in itself is a notable figure. Last year no one week registered 10 billion on-demand streams.

Not only that, but this year, the seven days following April 21 2017 saw a total of11.8 billion streams.

In the first six months of the year, Drake’s More Life was the most streamed album with 3.7 billion.

The most streamed song was Migos’ Bad And Boujee with 711.3 million streams – more than half of which were video streams.

Overall music consumption was up 9.9% in the January—June period, to 293 million project units from 266.6 million in the first half of 2016.

Song consumption grew 29.5%, to 1.5 billion songs, up from 1.2 billion.

Overall album sales down 13.9% to 740 million from 860 million; digital album sales slipped 24.3% to 34.5 million from 45.6 million.

Physical album sales continued to downtick, a further 2.1% in 2017 to 39.6 million. Vinyl album buys were up 2-.4%. They now account for 4.9% of all physical sales, up from 3.5% in 2016.

According to the BuzzAngle report, hip hop/rap remains the most popular genre in the United States. Its consumption grew 46.9% in the first half. It now represents 20.6% of all album sales, and 21% of all song consumption.

The second favourite was pop, with a 15.7% growth to represent 14.3% in both album and song share.

• R&B rose 10.9% to represent 9.3% of total share and 9.3% of song consumption.
• Latin sales continued to evolve, up 26.8% to now enjoying an 8.5% share, and 8.7% of song consumption.
• Country music too had a 33.5% advance, now 8% of the album market and 7.8% song consumption.
• Of other genres, rock grew 17.4 % in the period and now represents 7.3% of album sales.
• Alternative was up 5.8% to 5.8% share, indie rock by 9% to 4.4% share, dance by 13/2% to 2.9%, metal by 12% to 2.7% and electronica by 118% to 2.7% share.

A huge jump in song consumption happened inthe World Music sector, with an advance of 124% over the previous year.

See the full mid-year report at Buzzangle.