As streaming rapidly becomes music's leading format, the business is growing with it. In 2016, the industry tallied 561 million album-consumption units, according to Nielsen Music, a 3 percent increase over 2015's 543.8 million units -- the first time during the millennium that the industry has posted gains in two consecutive years.
To put it in perspective, on-demand streams were up a whopping 39.2 percent from 2015 (rising to 431.7 billion streams from 310.1 billion), offsetting plunging sales: CD album sales fell 16.5 percent (to 104.8 million from 125.3 million in 2015), digital album sales dropped 20.1 percent (to 82.2 million from 102.9 million) and digital song sales plummeted 25 percent (from 964.3 million units to 723.7 million).