Just some quick stats for your Monday.  According to Nielsen’s US Music Mid-Year report, the United States is consuming more music via streaming platforms than ever before.

Key stats from the report are:

“On-demand song streaming activity is reaching new milestones, with volume surpassing 400 billion, which is offsetting declines in album and track sales. On-demand audio streaming volume is up 45%, having already exceeded 268 billion so far in 2018, and on-demand video streaming volume is up 35% year-over-year.”

Some of us have noticed that the introduction of new record labels popping up all over the place.  A few years back reading that a new record label was opening up was on par with an announcement of a new Blockbuster Video opening its doors; it just wasn’t going to happen.  Not surprisingly, a lot of the labels that are popping up are actually old shuttered labels that closed their doors a decade or so ago when they were unequipped to handle the digital music revolution.  Now, with their parent companies (read the opening of a new label announcements with some skepticism, as they are often funded by a pre-existing major) finally reaping the benefit of deals struck with streaming platforms and the overall ease for consumers to stream music, revenue for labels is catching up.  With a better formula in place to collect revenue from the streaming platforms and with the number of consumers steadily rising, it is not surprising to see a renaissance of sorts  for record labels.

Let’s just hope that they have learned from the past and that the structure of deals for artists that are clamoring to sign are fair (or at least close to it).