Report: Music Listening Different from Music Sales

RADIO ONLINE | Thursday, January 29, 2015

Coleman Insights has released the second in a series about how listeners engage with music across traditional and emerging platforms. So, how do music buying patterns compare with how consumers listen to new music? To find out, the firm analyzed 26 consecutive weeks of the Billboard Top 10 Digital Songs chart, and applied the same analysis of Billboard's Top 10 songs for radio exposure and on-demand streaming.

The verdict? Coleman found that music buying and music listening patterns are fundamentally different. "When you understand why they're different, you'll also understand how making new music decisions based on sales data can lead your station astray," the company said in a blog post. "Digital download sales follow a different pattern than listening behavior."

"While the majority of songs listeners hear most on the radio and play most on on-demand streaming services (such as Spotify) are between nine and 20 weeks old, the majority of songs listeners buy most are 12 weeks old or less. That's the same 12-week pattern that drove airplay in the 1960s when Top 40 radio relied on record sales for many of its airplay decisions. Unlike radio exposure and on-demand streaming behavior, digital download sales do not build over time," the company said.

So, why are buying and listening patterns so different? Coleman explained that just because people stop buying a song doesn't mean people stop playing it. "Think about your own music collection. You probably own some songs that you forgot about almost as soon as you got them, just as you probably have songs you've listened to regularly for years. When a song's sales decline, it means fewer new people want to own it. It doesn't mean the people who already bought it stopped playing it."

In conclusion, Coleman said that "If you exposed new music on your radio station solely based on how well the song was selling, you'd play songs most frequently when hardly anyone in your audience knew the song. If you were to stop playing a song as soon as its sales dried up, you'd likely be dropping the song at the moment your audience was most interested in hearing it."