Hip Hop album sales declined in 2014, but statistics show fans of the genre discovered other alternatives to listen to their favorite artist’s new music.
A new report by music business worldwide compiled 2014 statistics from Nielsen Music data and the results show that R&B and Hip Hop fans opted for streaming sites to listen to new music. In fact, R&B and Hip Hop was the leading genre, with 28.5% of all streaming consumption during 2014.
The data incorporates stats from sites like Beats Music, Google play, Rhapsody, YouTube and Spotify, which each offered listeners the opportunity to listen to albums prior to their respective release dates.
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Last year, Billboard and Soundscan addressed the shift by beginning to add streaming numbers to the total album sales. They came up with the formula: 1,500 streams equals one album sale.
David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen, discussed the change in music intake with the New York Times in November.
“Album sales have become a smaller and smaller part of the industry,” he said at the time. “To just look at album sales and say this is how we measure success is really leaving out that half of the business that is coming from streams and song sales.”
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Check out the full chart, which shows the total streams by genre in 2014, below:
