Shawn RyanThe "stream"roller continues to squash the competition flat.
Streaming music remained the No. 1 method by which folks got their music in 2017. Nothing else was even on the same planet or even in the same solar system.
Last year, 377 billion - yes, with a "b" - streams floated down from the cloud or tore along fiber-optic cables, a 50 percent increase over 2016, or an increase of about 127 billion, according to the annual report on music consumption from BuzzAngle, which collects data on sales and other music-related information.
Despite those huge numbers, no one's getting rich from streaming except the streaming services. An artist makes about 0.007 cents each time his or her song is streamed or about $700 per million. You've just made enough to buy a 65-inch flat-screen TV or a couple of iPads. Congratulations.
Overall, the music industry grew by 12.8 percent in 2017, the third year of growth in a row, BuzzAngle reports. But streaming is about the only area that's showing gigantic growth, although vinyl sales went up 20 percent.
On the flip side, sales of album and song downloads dropped. Albums fell by 14.6 percent and songs by 23 percent. But, in good news ("good" being a relative term), the sales of physical albums, aka CDs, fell by "only" 7 percent, BuzzAngle says.
Here are some other Buzz-Angle numbers from 2017:
» "Shape of You" by Ed Sheeran was the most downloaded song at 2.6 million. That's about 150,000 more than 2016's most-downloaded song, "Can't Stop the Feeling" by Justin Timberlake.
» For the first time, a song broke one billion streams - "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, which was streamed 1.1 billion times.
» Drake was the most streamed artist at 6 billion streams.
» Rock remains the most popular genre overall.
» The average daily number of on-demand streams was about 1.1 million.
» The day with the most album sales, combining digital and physical, was Nov. 10 with 1.2 million. That was the day Taylor Swift's "Reputation" was released, and it accounted for 61 percent of all album sales.
The upshot of all these numbers is that music is still central to millions of lives on a daily basis; no surprise there.
But streaming and downloading doesn't bring in a lot of money to artists, record labels, music producers or songwriters. If a business can't make any money, how long can it sustain itself? Like any creative person, those in the music industry deserve to get paid for their work. You can't pay the bills on "Man, I really like that song you did."
Contact Shawn Ryan at mshawnryan@gmail.com.