Music: record revenues driven by streaming and…vinyl!

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the union of record labels in the United States, has released the 2021 record of music industry revenue in the country. Unsurprisingly, these are the music streaming services
which brought in the most money, but also vinyls and CDs which are picking up again.

A record $15 billion in retail revenue was hit, helped by a post-lockdown boom.

Streaming, well ahead of revenue

In all, the American music industry brought in $15 billion in 2021 compared to $12.1 billion in 2020, an increase of 24% in one year. If the revenues for the year 2021 are a small surprise, the fact that streaming largely leads these figures is less so since on-demand music services continue to grow inexorably year after year.

Streaming represents 83% of total revenues for the year 2021, bringing in $12.4 billion compared to just over $10 billion in 2020. These figures include, according to the union, revenues from paid subscriptions, streaming services ad-supported streaming, digital radio, Facebook music licensing and fitness apps. For the first time, and this partly explains this strong increase, the union is also counting income from TikTok US.

Let’s go down one more level. According to the 2021 year in review, paid subscriptions to a music streaming service account for 76% of streaming revenue, up 23% from 2020 to $9.5 billion. On the other hand, sales of albums and songs for download are down sharply, respectively by 12% (282 million dollars) and 16% (256 million dollars) to represent a total of only 4% of the overall revenues of the year.

A healthy physical market

Obviously, compared to streaming revenues, the share of revenues from physical sales does not seem very high, representing “only” 11% of the total. And yet, this sector recovered in 2021 after a complicated 2020 for sellers suffering from successive confinements and forced to close their stores.

The RIAA indicates that this is the first time since 1996 that CDs and vinyl have experienced an increase in their revenues in parallel over the same year to reach 1.656 billion dollars. Vinyl records are the clear top seller with revenue up 61% from 2020, reaching $1 billion. New record there too since the union tells us that this figure has not been reached by this medium since 1986.

CD revenue rose 21% to $584 million, the first year-over-year increase for CD revenue since 2004 in the United States. All in all, a fine year for the American music industry, which remains 40% less important than in 1999 if inflation is counted, according to the RIAA.

Sources: RIAA
, pitchfork