BBC Newsbeat: Music streaming reaches a record high in 2015

THE BRITISH PHONOGRAPHIC INDUSTRY (BPI) has revealed that music streams have “exploded” by 80 percent year on year, a figure which will be further boosted by this week’s arrival of Apple Music.

Using the Album Equivalent Sales (AES) industry metric, overall consumption of recorded music was up 4% compared with the first six months of 2014 – a significant improvement on the same point past year, when Album Equivalent Sales were down by 5.8%. The newest figures released by the Official Charts Company revealed that 11.5 million tracks were streamed in the first six months of this year.

While Official Charts Data does not include video streams on platforms like YouTube, statistics show there has been a 98.2% rise against the 2014 January-June period. That represents a massive growth year-on-year as 6.4 billion were streamed in the equivalent period in 2014.

“Millions of households are experiencing the joy of instantly playing any song they want”, the BPI’s chief executive Geoff Taylor has said.

The most streamed track in the United Kingdom in 2015 so far is Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk, which has been streamed a staggering 45 millions times to date. Sales have risen 5 percent over past year, thanks in part to the likes of Now 90, which apparently outsold the entire annual total achieved by its 2014 equivalent, Now 87.

James Devaney/Getty ImagesMusic streaming is booming, at least in the United Kingdom.

One of the biggest contributors to the music turnaround however is the performance of the compilations market, which continues to flourish.

Compilations album sales helped slow a 10% decline in total physical CD and LP sales previous year to just 4% in the first half of 2015.

Naturally, all those extra streams have had an impact on physical sales (CDs, LPs, and minority physical album formats) of music, but the decline isn’t as bad as you might expect. Rock titles continue to be the biggest sellers, led by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ album Chasing Yesterday. The year-end tally for LPs could approach the 2 million mark. Paloma Faith / A flawless Contradiction RCA Label Group / Sony Music 10.