Remember 2015? When we all had bad blood and couldn't feel our faces when we were uptown funkin'? Turns out 2015 was the most successful year the music industry has seen in 15 years, according to new figures.
That's in terms of growth, anyway: People don't spend nearly as much on music as they did in the heady days of the early 2000s before digital music, piracy and streaming turned the market upside down. But the amount of money spent by music fans is growing. In 2015, industry revenue grew 5 percent, reaching nearly $19 billion.
The figures come from industry analyst Futuresource, which examined revenue from sales of CDs, vinyl and other physical media, of subscription services such as Spotify and Apple Music, and of pay-per-download outlets including iTunes.
In 2016, streaming has reached new levels of legitimacy following December's belated arrival of The Beatles on Spotify, Apple Music blasting to 13 million paid subscribers and big-name albums launching on Tidal.
But streaming hasn't been fully embraced quite yet: Germans and Japanese, for example, still spend most of their music budgets on CDs.
