The key finding: in the week ending 21 July 2013, the top 50 tracks on Spotify US were streamed 29.8m times in total. In the week ending 20 July 2014, the top 50 tracks were streamed 62.1m times – a year-on-year rise of 108%.
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Spotify’s homeland of Sweden, where the service is truly mainstream, showed year-on-year growth of just over 27% in the same period: from 19.7m plays of the top 50 in the week ending 21 July 2013 to 25.1m in the week ending 20 July 2014.
That’s a mature streaming market, but it also means the UK is seemingly on the verge of overtaking Sweden – by the same metric, it saw growth of 162% year-on-year, from 9.1m top-50 track plays to 23.7m. The Netherlands (78%), Spain (100%), Germany (103%) and France (158%) also saw strong growth.
Spotify provides weekly stats which is very useful
A Billboard analysis of year-to-date of track sales examined the trend in U.S. sales of the most popular tracks. It found that while overall track sales were down 12.8 percent through August 10th, the top 200 tracks were down 13.8 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In other words, the drop in track sales has been slighted weighted toward the top 200 tracks.
A better apples-to-apples comparison can be made by considering sales of only the top 50 tracks (to match the depth of Spotify's charts). With that, the story is slightly changed: the top 50 tracks declined 11.8 percent year-over-year, while over roughly the same period streams of the top 50 tracks on Spotify grew 108 percent. Even so, the crux of the story hasn't changed: track sales have fallen as consumers have flocked to on-demand audio streaming.
