People love Macklemore, streaming music is taking over, and indie fans are buying more vinyl than ever before. Oh, and there’s this guy called Justin Timberlake who is very popular.
Justin Timberlake is the biggest star in music right now.
Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience is far and away the best-selling album of 2013 – with 2,037,000 sold so far, it's the only album to sell over a million copies this year. (Bruno Mars is the closest, with 985,000 copies of Unorthodox Jukebox sold since January, though it came out in December 2012.) It's also the best-selling digital album and the best-selling physical album, and the record's lead single "Suit & Tie" is the fourth most-played radio song and eighth highest-selling digital track.
People looooooooooove Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.
The rap duo's album, The Heist, is the seventh highest-selling album overall, with 653,000 sold in the United States since January. The Heist is mainly driven by digital sales – 470,000 of those sales came from digital retailers – and the individual track sales for "Thrift Shop" and "Can't Hold Us" are through the roof, with the former topping the list of the best-selling digital tracks. Both songs were released in 2012, but just in this calendar year, "Thrift Shop" has sold 5,558,000 copies, and "Can't Hold Us" has sold 3,129,000. "Thrift Shop" is also the fifth most-played song on the radio, with approximately 363,000 spins on terrestrial radio since the beginning of the year.
On top of all that, "Thrift Shop" has been streamed around 186,778,000 times this year, as a combined total of streaming services like Spotify and Rdio, and videos on YouTube and Vevo. This is a phenomenal success, even more so because the music was released on Macklemore's own label, so he and Lewis are getting an enormous chunk of all that revenue.
Streaming audio is slowly taking over.
Overall sales for digital tracks in the first half of 2013 fell 2.4% to 682 million downloads from 698 million in 2012, while audio and video music streams increased 24% to a staggering 50.9 billion. It's by far the biggest area of growth in the music industry, and a clear indication that consumer habits are shifting away from downloading in favor of accessing music from the "cloud."
