German music market grows
After a successful first half of the year, the music industry in Germany also recorded a significant increase in sales for 2019 as a whole: revenue from music sales and income from the streaming business grew by 8.2 percent.
In total, revenue amounted to 1.623 billion euros. Following two years of decline in 2017 and 2018, the world's fourth-largest music market thus returned to the positive global trend of recent years in 2019. Several factors contributed to the growth in revenue: the dynamic growth of audio streaming (up 27 percent), a year-on-year decline in CD sales that almost halved (minus 10.5 percent) and a 13.3 percent increase in vinyl records.
As the leading market segment, audio streaming now accounts for 55.1% of total sales, followed by CDs (29%), downloads (6.2%) and vinyl (4.9% share of sales). In total, 64.4 percent of revenue was generated in digital business segments last year (up 20.8 percent) and, correspondingly, 35.6 percent with physical sound carriers (down 8.9 percent).
In terms of the share of certain music genres in sales, pop remained the genre with the highest sales in 2019 at 25.8%. For the first time, however, hip-hop/rap moved into second place with a share of 19.7%, just ahead of rock (19.6%). Children's products (9.8%) and dance (7.3%) are also among the five most successful segments in terms of sales.
