“Last year downloads declined by 16% in nominal terms,” he says. That trend is continuing.Īpple still controls the digital download market, with about 65% to 70% of the total, says Mulligan: he suggests that the death knell for downloads will come with a redesign of the iTunes app interface that de-emphasises downloads in favour of the Music subscription streaming service. But even by 2014 they were falling, from £397.3m the previous year to £338.1m, while streaming grew to £175m. And the people who grew up buying CDs are the older music consumers – the CD will literally die out only when they do.”ĭownloads outsold physical formats for the first time in the UK in 2011, when streaming services were in their infancy. The CD has a fairly universal player, where there’s always at least one in a house. So how much longer do downloads have? A few years and they’re dead, says Mark Mulligan, music analyst at Midia Consulting: “It’s going to die before the CD. Streaming songs is becoming ever more popular with music fans. At about £20 an album, vinyl sold about 120,000 units, against the equivalent of 2.6m digital tracks costing 79p.īut look more closely and the gap isn’t that big: at 10 songs per album, digital downloads were only the equivalent of 260,000 albums. Thus the download is in rapid decline – so much so that at the end of November, the value of sales in the old vinyl format surpassed those of digital in the UK over a week, by £2.4m to £2.1m. The people who embraced downloading, started in 2003 by Apple’s iTunes music store, were the tech-savvy types who shifted easily over to streaming.

The disadvantage: if you stop paying the monthly stipend of about £10, the access, playlists and downloads evaporate.īy contrast, a purchased download lasts forever – but it’s the only thing you can listen to. Streaming’s advantages are that you can listen to any of millions of tracks whenever you like, and create playlists paying subscribers can also download individual tracks for offline listening. By the end of September, it had racked up 1.695m sales, including nearly 505,000 downloads and a whopping 119m streams. This summer, Drake’s One Dance matched the record achieved by Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around for 15 weeks at No 1 in the UK singles chart – which now combines download, physical and streaming equivalent sales.

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