A new year end report from Nielsen offers some interesting data regarding music consumer’s listening habits, some of which run contrary to common perceptions about the popularity of various genres.
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Guest Post by Bobby Owsinski on Music 3.0
If you were to listen to a week of nothing but radio, you’d think that all we listen to in the U.S. is pop and country music. If you were to read a week’s worth of the music news, you might think that dance/electronic/EDM was close to the top of the heap in what we enjoy. The problem with those assumptions is that they’re wrong, at least according to the 2015 Nielsen Year End Music Report that, among other things, looked at the genres of music we liked the best last year.
When taking into account the total amount of music consumption, which includes physical and downloaded albums, downloaded tracks, and streams, here’s the order of music genre preference that the study determined:
Rock – 24.5%
R&B/Hip-Hop – 18.2%
Pop – 15.7%
Country – 8.5%
Latin – 4.5%
Dance/EDM – 3.4%
Christian – 2.8%
Holiday/Seasonal – 1.7%
Classical – 1.3%
Childrens – 1.1%
When it came to number of albums consumed, Rock was far ahead at 32.6%, followed by R&B/Hip-Hop at 15.1% and Pop at 22.6%.
For streams, R&B/Hip-Hop came out on top at 21.1%. Rock at 17.5%. and Pop at 14.5%.
Rock might not be the hippest genre and it’s frequently portrayed in the press as spiraling downward in popularity and relevancy, but it still continues to out-perform other music genres, for better or worse.