On-Demand Audio Streaming Hits Record High, Is Up 62.4% Over Last Year

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report from Nielsen out this week paints a picture of the booming on-demand audio streaming business, pointing to a significant increase in consumers' use of streaming services and record numbers of streams being served. According to the mid-year report, which focuses only on the U.S. market, on-demand audio streams surpassed the 7 billion figure for the first time ever during March of this year. That's audio streams, to be clear -- not just music. That is, the term "audio" also includes non-music streams like spoken word recordings and podcasts -- the latter of which has also seen rapid growth. Nielsen isn't breaking out music versus non-music streams in this new report, but a prior figure from the measurement firm stated that monthly podcast consumption had doubled over the past five years among adults. Still, the rise of streaming music services like Spotify and Apple Music have surely played a role in reaching the new milestones. Says Nielsen, streaming hit a high point of 7.5 billion weekly on-demand audio streams during the week ending March 9, 2017. That's the first time the figure had ever topped 7 billion, setting a new record. In addition, on-demand audio has been streamed over 184 billion times so far in 2017 â" a huge 62.4 percent increase over the same time period in 2016.