Last week marked the return of Market Watch after a nearly three-year absence from the pages of a Billboard publication. Each Thursday evening Billboard Bulletin -- including today's (June 21) edition -- will feature the weekly Market Watch, fully powered by Nielsen Music based on its Industry Report available in Nielsen Connect 2.0.
Billboard Bulletin is available to all Billboard All Access and Billboard Digital subscribers. To subscribe visit www.billboard.com/subscribe.
Market Watch will provide weekly activity for streaming, sales and consumption units, as well as year-to-date information for those categories. In addition, consumption units will be broken out by various album and album equivalent formats.
The returning Market Watch will also include a new feature: a weekly rotating section highlighting year-to-date breakouts between catalog and current titles for albums sales, digital songs sales and streaming.
Market Watch provides an overview of album consumption units, incorporating album plus track equivalent plus audio-on-demand album equivalent units, as used in compiling the Billboard 200. However, one can also calculate consumption units including video-on-demand streaming equivalent album units by the additional data Market Watch presents of those metrics.
As the industry watched album sales grow from about 6 million units weekly in the mid-1990s to 12 million units a week by the end of that decade -- and as it enjoyed the rise of digital track sales from 6 million to about 20 million units a week during the first decade of the new millennium and back down in the second decade -- the growth of streaming can now be monitored weekly in the pages of Billboard Bulletin on a weekly basis to see how much further it can rise. Already we've seen spikes from 11 billion streams a week in 2017 to 16 billion streams a week this year and beyond.
