Thanks to great growth in streaming, the German music industry has put up with the consequences of the corona pandemic in terms of sales in 2020. “The income from sales of sound carriers and revenues from the streaming business amounted to 1.79 billion euros, an increase of nine percent compared to 2019,” announced the Federal Association of the Music Industry (BVMI) on Thursday in Berlin. The market in Austria also grew in 2020 thanks to streaming.
Image: APA (dpa)
71.5 percent, or almost three quarters of sales, resulted from online music usage in Germany. After an already high level in 2019, the share of audio streaming with 55.5 percent market share at the 2020 annual financial statements was even 63.4 percent. At the beginning of January, the BVMI announced that, according to a special evaluation by the market research institute GfK Entertainment, more than 139 billion music streams had been recorded in the previous year – almost a third more than 2019 (107 billion) and three quarters more than 2018 (79.5 billion). .
According to the industry figures, the temporary closure of stores was clearly noticeable in CD sales: The share of total sales fell again by 18 percent, but at 21.6 percent the silver disc is still the second-strongest format on the German music market. The vinyl record (5.5 percent of the total market share) follows at a clear distance – for the first time in a long time in third place – ahead of the increasingly insignificant downloads (4.2 percent). According to its own information, the Federal Association of the Music Industry represents the interests of around 200 record producers and companies that represent more than 80 percent of the German music market.
There was also an increase in Austria, where sales in the previous year grew by 3.4 percent to EUR 171.6 million. The streaming segment contributed more than half to this result; 91.6 million euros were earned here, which corresponds to an increase of around a third. For the CD, there was a full minus of 22 percent to 30.5 million euros, as the domestic industry association IFPI announced in mid-February.
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