Pavement, a band who haven’t recorded any music since 1999, released a new video this week – to a song from 1997. In recent years, the song has become a streaming hit for them.
Everyone will tell you that streaming is booming – and it is. But the music data company MRC (formerly known as SoundScan) dropped a heavy qualification in their 2021 summary report, released in January:
“For the first time since MRC Data began tracking streaming data, streaming of new music has declined in volume year-over-year. Which means Catalog has gained a significant share of total listening in 2021, increasing nearly 5 points from 2020 to 70% of total album consumption.”
Did you catch that? Streaming is indeed going up, just like you thought. But the streaming of new music is going down. So far down that in 2021 only three of every ten streamed songs were new releases.
If streaming is replacing radio, it’s oldies stations up and down the dial.
Why would…
