2016 Is Worst Year for Album Sales in Modern Era

By one measure, the music industry hasn’t been this bad in 25 years. As Billboard reports, album sales for the first six months of the year were their lowest since SoundScan (now Nielsen Music) started keeping track in 1991. Overall, U.S. album sales dropped to 100.3 million—a 13.6% drop compared with the same 2015 time period. However, Billboard estimates revenue has climbed 8.9% to $1.98 billion so far in 2016, though it notes some indie labels have said those estimates overstate income from streaming. That rise is partly due to streaming, which jumped 58.7% to 208.9 billion songs.
Drake’s VIEWS is the only 2016 album to sell 1 million copies, with 1.3 million album sales in the first half of the year. VIEWS also notched 317,000 track-equivalent albums (TEA, where an album unit equals 10 track sales). And it stacked up 979,000 stream-equivalent albums (SEA, where one album unit equals 1,500 streams).
Elsewhere, David Bowie’s Blackstar is 2016’s top-selling vinyl album so far, with almost 57,000 copies sold. Compared with the first six months of 2015, vinyl sales grew 11.4% to 6.2 million copies. CD sales tumbled 11.6% to 40 million and digital album sales slid 18% to 43.8 million.
Pitchfork has reached out to Nielsen for further data.
Read “Is 2016 Music’s Biggest Year in Decades?” over on the Pitch.