Over the last few years there has been a number of monumental paradigm shifts in certain industries. However, it is doubtful that there has been many paradigm shifts bigger than what has been seen by the switch of audio and video content from the physical medium to a digital one. In particular, to the streaming medium. Each year, there are a number of new companies looking to provide more ways for consumer to gain direct access to video and audio content online. As a result, it is largely expected that the number of streams is only likely to continue to rise in both the near and far futures.
On that note, Nielsen has now released their end-of-year report which provides some insight into how the audio streaming domain currently looks. The report highlight how streams from on-demand services like Spotify, Google Play Music, Rhapsody, YouTube, Vevo and so on have fared over the last year. In terms of the numbers, the report details that overall music streams for last year saw some massive gains. In fact, a percentage change of almost 93-percent. In 2014, the figure listed was 164.5 billions streams and in 2015, the new figure came in at 317.2 billion. Highlighting a massive uptake in the number of streams overall. Delving into the numbers a little more and it seems music video was the most streamed aspect and accounted for 172.4 billion streams in 2015. This is up from 85.4 billion in 2014 and marked a percent shift of 101.9-percent.
While video accounted for the higher number of streams, audio was not too far behind in reality. The report details that the number of audio streams in 215 came in t 144.9 billion. This figure was up from 79.1 billion and marked a change of 83.1-percent over the two years. So while audio did gain in a similar fashion to video, the change year-over-year does highlight that video is widening the gap overall. This might comes as a bit of a surprise to some, as it would be expected that audio streams would make up the majority of audio playback. However, when you factor in that aspects like YouTube and Vevo and other services do offer ways to stream music videos for free (or at least cheaper), then ‘price’ could be one of the determining factors in results like these. Of course, whether that changes next year remains to be seen. With both music video and audio streaming companies looking at new ways to bring content to mobile devices, the one certainty is that the overall number of streams is likely to significantly increase again.