Rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie topped the US album chart last week with a record low sales of just 823 albums. With no release on CD or vinyl, the 823 albums sold in the week ending January 10th were all digital downloads.
The #1 came mostly from streams, with his album “Hoodie Szn” streamed 83 million times across all platforms.
The record sales low shows just quickly listeners are shifting from the purchase of music to streaming. Multiple sources have told Hypebot that 2019 is the year that iTunes will phase out download sales entirely.
In 2018, was not a single song broke one million in download sales, according to BuzzAngle Music. In 2017, there were 14 songs million selling songs, in 2016 36 and in 2015 there were 60. Even vinyl album sales were up just 12% in 2018, after seeing 20% growth in both 2017 and 2016. In contrast, On-demand audio streams set a record high of 534.6 billion in the US in 2018, up 42% over the previous year.
photo above: Curtis Huynh for The Come Up Show [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons