YouTube as audio streaming surpasses music videos

Audio didn’t quite kill the video star, but it’s making a comeback. Americans are now on-demand streaming more songs as audio than they’re consuming through music videos. The shift highlights the importance of music in the battle for mobile profits, plus it could help artists get paid more.

Analytics provider BuzzAngle Music tells TechCrunch that since the start of 2016, Americans purposefully played 114 billion audio streams on apps like Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music, versus watching 95 billion music video streams on apps like YouTube. This represents a big resurgence for pure listening since the rise of MTV.

On-demand Audio streaming was up 107.8 percent in the US compared to the first half of 2015, while video streaming grew 23 percent. On-demand streaming as a whole rose 58.3 percent, and these numbers don’t count online radio streaming like Pandora.