BuzzAngle Music has released its 2017 report on U.S. music consumption. The year saw a significant increase in overall consumption, 12.8 percent over 2016, that marks the third year in a row with increasing growth.

Streaming consumption continued its huge growth with a 50.3 percent increase to 377B streams, 127B more streams than in 2016. Subscription streams are now at 80 percent of total audio streams, up from 76 percent in 2016.

The top digital album of 2017 was reputation by Taylor Swift with 865,446 digital sales, and it was one of only two albums to break 1 million in pure album sales during 2017. The other was ÷ by Ed Sheeran with 1,042,255 albums sold. 

Streams reached a new record high of 376.9 billion, up 50 percent over 2016, while subscription streams grew 57 percent and accounted for 80 percent of total audio streams in 2017, up from 76% in 2016.  There were more than twice as many streams on any given day during 2017 (daily average of 1.67 billion) then there were song downloads for the entire year (563.7 million). Vinyl sales were also up 20 over 2016 and accounted for 10 of all physical album sales (up from 8 in 2016). There were 16 songs that were streamed more than 500 million times in 2017, compared to six in 2016 and two in 2015. 383 songs streamed more than 100 million times in 2017, compared to 226 songs in 2016 and 111 songs in 2015. And the top 1,000 streamed songs in 2017 accounted for 122.2 billion streams, an increase of 33% over 2016’s top 1,000 streamed songs (91.8 billion).

In 2017, one song broke the one billion-stream mark for the first time ever, “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee (1.1 billion streams) and was also the most-streamed song of the year. Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” was the second most-streamed song with 979.3 million streams.

29.3 percent of all album sales in 2017 were rock albums, with more than 43 million in sales. 19.7 percent were pop titles, 14.1 percent were urban, and 12 percent were country albums. 23 percent of song sales in 2017 were titles from rock, 22.2 percent were urban, 21.9 percent were pop, and 12.6 percent country.