Source link : https://las-vegas-news.com/from-vinyl-to-streaming-the-music-consumption-trends-for-2026/
Think about how you listened to music ten years ago. Maybe you owned a CD collection, or perhaps you were already streaming on Spotify. Fast forward to today and the landscape is almost unrecognizable. We’re living through a moment where vinyl records sit alongside algorithmic playlists, where the tactile experience of dropping a needle competes with instant access to millions of songs at our fingertips.
The way we consume music has always been evolving. From wax cylinders to cassettes, from radio waves to digital files. Yet the past few years have brought changes that feel particularly dramatic. Streaming has become the undisputed king of music consumption, commanding the vast majority of how we discover and enjoy music. Physical formats, once left for dead, are experiencing unexpected resurgences in niche markets. Let’s dive into what’s really happening in music consumption as we move through 2026.
Streaming Dominance Reaches New Heights
The global music industry hit 5.1 trillion streams in 2025 according to Luminate’s Year-End Report, marking a new single-year record with a 9.6% increase from 2024. That’s not a typo. Five point one trillion. To put that in perspective, if you tried to listen to every single one of those streams back to back, you’d be sitting there for roughly sixteen million years.
Let’s be real, these numbers are staggering. In the U.S., on-demand audio streams reached…
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Author : Matthias Binder
Publish date : 2026-01-16 18:48:00
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