Humans, on average, listen to 18.4 hours of music each week. That’s equivalent to around 368 three minute audio tracks. This is according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry 2021 Engaging with Music report.
The 2019 version of this report put that weekly average at 18 hours.
Over that time period music streaming listenership increased by 51 percent and now constitutes 23 percent of all music consumed by humans.
Radio takes a mere 16 percent of the listening pie, but interestingly only 9 percent of music that people listen to is owned or, in other words, bought.
We are buying personal listening devices, though. This year headphone revenue in the US in up to 16.86 billion dollars. With an almost 3 percent annual growth predicted for the next five years.
There are many headphone and speaker brands that will sell their quality as being “the way the artist intended” but are absent when you go into the production studio. That’s why I spoke toke Alvin Le Roux, or LAYROO as he is known by his legion of fans, because he is an artist and producer.
The whirlwind of tech advancement from transistor radios – first on shelves in 1954 – audio cassettes – an engineering triumph from Philips in 1958, and immortalized by Nina Simone in 1966 – and the CD player released by Sony in 1982 will make your head spin. No wonder the boomers are so eager to jump on the next tech trend.
When Steve Jobs first held up the iPod in 2007 he saved the music industry. In one technology generation we went from a reality of physical ownership of actual discs or files to an idea that music can exist seamlessly across devices.
We gave up ownership for convenience, just like we offered up the headphone jack for the freedom of living untethered.
This isn’t the artist’s intention, but a by-product of a corporate machine. Artists like Lay Roo, thankfully, are still compelled to create.
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