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COVID-19 boosts music streaming, physical media not fairing well: report

COVID-19 might be one of the final nails in the coffin for CD sales

The latest streaming music report from Nielsen shows how the Canadian music industry has been experiencing a downturn since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report states that total Canadian album sales are down 38.3 percent, and compared to last year, CD sales are down another 51.8 percent.

Digital albums, songs and physical vinyl record sales are all also down roughly 20-30 percent compared to last year.

Diving down to stats at a weekly level, you can see that Vinyl is up 20.7 percent compared to last week, but everything else is still low, according to A Journal of Musical Things. 

The one highlight is that compared to this time last year, streaming music is up by 16 percent. While this may not be the principal way musicians can gather revenue, at least it shows that people are still listening to music.

While this is bad news for the Canadian music industry, it’s even worse for artists since they’re unable to make money by performing live shows and are forced to rely on their music sales, which are down.

While some industries are able to make it out of the COVID-19 pandemic relatively unscathed, it will be interesting to see what happens to the music industry and physical media sales after this pandemic is over.

Source: A Journal of Musical Things

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