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Advances in technology and increasing openness to new ideas has radically changed the craft of composing film scores, finds James McCarthy John Williams, with director George […]

By Ben Sisario Two brothers say the song’s signature lyric came out of their writing session, and are seeking credit. The singer’s team says the claim has […]

Welcome to the 2019 Nielsen Music Mid-Year Report, which provides an exclusive glimpse at the music industry’s leading trends, data and insights from the past six months. The first half of 2019 saw a six-month record of over 507 billion on-demand streams, an exciting new milestone led by singles and albums by Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Halsey, Khalid, BTS, Lil Nas X and Bad Bunny that span a wide array of genres, moods and even languages. LPs continue to show strength and lend resilience to physical albums, as independent retail events like Record Store Day continue to bring music fans in droves. This year’s celebration led to the highest non-holiday sales total at independent retail since 2005, and extended vinyl’s hot streak as the format increases 19% year-to-date. All data cited in this story is compiled by Nielsen Music. In this report, Nielsen is using a 24-week period for this year, running from Jan. 4 through June 20; while last year’s corresponding period ran from Dec. 29, 2017, through June 14, 2018. Also, due to the fact that at mid-year 2018 Nielsen adapted different weighting for album consumption units for paid-audio streams (1,250 streams per unit), ad-supported streams and video streams (3,750 streams per unit), last year’s album consumption unit numbers were updated to reflect the current ratios for this story, in order to present an apples-to-apples comparison. Over the course of the next 30-plus pages, Nielsen Music has compiled all the essential learnings you need to power the rest of your 2019. And as always, we’d love to hear from you to learn how we can provide more tools to prepare you for music’s everchanging landscape. Email us at music@nielsen.com

As revealed by Nielsen data, that was up 27.8% on the 261.0bn streams recorded in the equivalent period of 2018. However, in real growth terms, this was a less positive story.