A lot. A tiny percentage of songs now accounts for a large percentage of total plays.
For all the changes in the music business — now dominated by digital over physical and streaming rather than sales — hits remain as important as ever. In 2020, nearly half of the 877.2 billion on-demand audio streams in the United States came from just 13,521 songs that were streamed over 10 million times — or 0.022% of the titles that MRC Data tracked.
Market concentration was similar in 2018 and 2019 for the various stream buckets, with a variable swing of no more than .5%. Likewise, the number of titles in each bucket yielded similar percentages in 2018 and 2019 with a spread differential of no more than 20 basis points, or .2%.
Back in 1995, the 336 albums that sold over 250,000 copies — 0.2% of the nearly 147,000 releases available at the time — generated almost 40% of sales. Combined with the second bucket of albums that sold between 25,000 and 250,000 copies, that meant 3,328 albums, or 2.2% of releases, accounted for 72.5% of total sales.
At least part of the reason such a small percentage of songs now accounts for such a large percentage of total streaming is that there’s so much more music available than there was then. While consumers in 1995 could choose among 146,693 albums — which, combined, probably contained somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.75 million songs — in 2020, MRC Data tracked 61,189,195 songs, the equivalent of about 5 million to 6 million albums. But the business of unpopular music isn’t exactly exploding.
The idea that the long tail represents a significant business opportunity doesn’t hold up, either — at least when it comes to music streaming. In 1995, the bottom bucket of 134,000 albums that sold fewer than 5,000 copies each would have accounted for 67 million in total sales and brought labels about $536 million in revenue, assuming an average wholesale price of $8 per album. Last year, however, the 60.
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