From radio and online to movies and even video games, music listeners today have more options to find music than ever before. And theyโre increasingly using streaming to listen whenโand whereโthey want. According to our most recent Music 360 report, 80% of American music listeners used an online streaming service (including music, video and live-broadcast radio) in the last 12 months, up from 75% in 2015.
For those in the music industry, the โwhereโ behind the listen is important to find fans and opportunities to develop new ones. The latest enhancement to our Music Connect dashboard gives users the ability to do just that, breaking out streaming data by over 200 U.S. markets.
Music Connect is a one-stop shop for clients to access sales, streaming, airplay spins and audience, and social measurement data for the music industry. Since its launch in 2015, weโve consistently released new features and enhancements every six-eight weeks. The latest update gives users the ability to break out on-demand audio streaming, as well as total music consumption for songs and albums, across all 210 Nielsen-measured marketsโthe most comprehensive market-level U.S. coverage available in the industry.
This new feature helps clients better understand where the highest levels of streaming activity for a song or album are taking place, down to the market level. Paired with sales and airplay data, clients can now use Music Connect to understand the true impact of an artistโs tour, festival, promotional appearance or other regional event. With streaming being such a crucial component of todayโs music consumption, clients can use granular geographic data to plan artist campaigns and new release strategies.
Market-level streaming metrics have also been added to Music Connectโs Top Album/Song by Market & Metric charts, as well as to the Insight reporting toolโwhere clients can create and export custom reports based on their albums/artists/songs of interest. This data currently makes up approximately 70% of the total U.S. audio on-demand streaming data being sent to Nielsen by providers.
โWith users and usage growing week over week, the industry is now relying on the essential insights available in Music Connect,โ says Erin Crawford, general manager, Nielsen Music. โThe deep market-level streaming and consumption data is just the latest Music Connect enhancement leading the industry. Weโre confident that our development road map will continue to deliver more of what people are expecting, as well as some surprises that will reinforce our measurement authority.โ
