Nielsen’s 2014 Music U.S. Report shows a lot of interesting numbers about the music industry. What stands out the most for me, however, is the very low rate of streaming of classical music or jazz. As you can see below, each of these genres represented only 0.3% of the total streaming market. (The total comes to less than 100%, presumably because other genres are not listed.)
It’s possible that people don’t stream this music, and buy CDs instead. (But only 1.4% of total sales for each genre). Or it’s possible that streaming services aren’t very good for these genres, preventing people from steaming a lot. Either way, these numbers are very bad. And I assume that, for classical music, they also include “crossover” albums which, while not strictly classical, get counted as such.