Chart News: 61% of people discover new music on radio

Did you know less than 1% of the world’s population are currently paying for on-demand music streaming services?

The wider industry continues to hope that the likes of Spotify and Apple Music will provide salvation – and early signs from the Nordics and other territories certainly provide reason for hope.

But why are the vast majority of people refusing to put their hand in their pocket for ‘all the music in the world’?

New research out of the US from Nielsen Music brings us closer to the answer.

The research company has conducted what it calls ‘a comprehensive, in-depth study of consumer interaction with music in the United States’ for its Nielsen Music 360 Report – analysing the responses of more than 3,300 US music fans.

The Report covers a range of topics and provides reason to be cheerful: apparently 75% of US consumers now listen to music online in a typical week, for example.

There’s also a shot in the arm for radio.

According to Nielsen’s respondents, 61% of people say they discover new music on the wireless today, which has actually increased from the 57% who agreed in 2014.

Meanwhile, streaming services, including YouTube, inform 27% of people about new music.

That’s less than a third of radio’s influence, but also behind the recommendations of friends and family (45%) and movies / movie soundtracks (31%).

Nielsen then directly addresses the elephant in the room: why aren’t more people paying a $ 9.99 subscription price for streaming?

The ‘under 1%’ stat that started this article, by the way, comes from the fact that out of 7 billion people in the world, just 41m coughed up for an on-demand music streaming subscription last year, according to the IFPI – 0.58% of the world’s populace.

That’s lower than the total number of people paying for a Netflix subscription around the world every month.

Even just in the US, we can deduce that music streaming isn’t exactly flying just yet.

According to the IFPI, paid-for music streaming services accrued $ 494.7m in the US in 2014. Across a population of 319m people, that worked out at an average of just $ 1.55 per person.

Another way to slice those figures: $ 494.7m equates to around 4.1m X $ 120-per-year subscriptions.