The future of music consumption remains to be unclear, bringing in record all time lows for album sales this year.
As Billboard reports, album sales for the first six months of the year were their lowest since SoundScan (now Nielsen Music) started keeping track in 1991. Overall, U.S. album sales dropped to 100.3 million—a 13.6% drop compared with the same 2015 time period. However, Billboard estimates revenue has climbed 8.9% to $1.98 billion so far in 2016, though it notes some indie labels have said those estimates overstate income from streaming. That rise is partly due to streaming, which jumped 58.7% to 208.9 billion songs.
