Another year goes by and quite an interesting one at that. We at Loudest.in have compiled some of the most prominent moments this year that contributed towards building revenue in the Music Industry in 2017.

1. Ed-Fest 2017 on the Charts crossed $5m mark from Spotify in 2 months

"Shape of you" was released in January this year with its debut itself on the top of the charts. The song was a pre-release to promote his album '÷ '. The album took the online and offline music consumption storm and did not stop until Ed Sheeran has 400m daily listeners on Spotify and went on to have over 1.5 billion streams. This made "Shape of you" the most listened to track on Spotify ever and the third to have ever crossed a billion streams. There may still be time for some other popular song to beat him, though, at this point in time, it looks like 2017 will conclude with “Shape Of You” as the bestselling title of the year. At the mid-year mark, Nielsen Music reported that Sheeran’s massive hit was the only song to actually sell at least two million copies, and it was at least half a million units ahead of the nearest competition. In this day and age, sales are dwindling across the board, especially when it comes to singles, so Sheeran’s accomplishment did not go unnoticed, and it has continued to sell thousands of units every week since. In addition to its Hot 100 on the Billboard reign, "Shape of you" topped the Radio Songs chart for 12 weeks, Digital Song Sales for 10 weeks and Streaming Songs for four frames. It has drawn 813 million on-demand U.S. audio and video streams and sold 2.3 million downloads (through Aug. 24), according to Nielsen Music, while its cumulative radio audio audience reach (through Aug. 27) had surpassed 4.6 billion impressions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGwWNGJdvx8

2. Latin Music Cross Over leads to rise in value by almost 45% in 2017

First came "Shape of you" and then came "Despacito" followed by "Mi Gente". The Music Industry has begun to prove that language isn't much of a barrier anymore. RIAA mid-year report, which shows that U.S. Latin Music revenues in the first half of 2017 grew by 44% ($115 million), from the previous year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk Even the power of streaming accounting for the majority of Latin music’s revenue rose by 82%. Artists and labels, according to the RIAA report, cleared $20 million from free on-demand services such as YouTube. Latin music revenues made up 2.9% of the total U.S. recorded music market totaling $4 billion in the first half of 2017. Physical and digital unit-based Latin music product sales decreased in the first half of 2017 by 14% as track downloads decreased by 4%, according to the RIAA report. Additionally, total digital download revenues were down 6% to $10 million and revenues from physical shipments of Latin music products were down by 15% to $7 million. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnJ6LuUFpMo

3. Digital Sales Attain 'Tipping Point' Over Physical sales with streaming consumption doubled in 2017

  The industry crashed just about 2 decades with the launch of Sean Parker's notorious Peer-to-Peer website Napster. Since then, the industry has been in turmoil on how to make more value towards digital music. Finally, 2017 came down as the year subscription streaming did indeed change the game. The once-ailing music industry has hit a “historical tipping point”, recording its second year of growth and revenues of $15.7bn (£12.2bn) in 2016, according to the IFPI report. In BuzzAngle’s Mid-Year 2017, overall music consumption grew 9.9% over last year.  The analytics firm reported 293 million project units in 2017 over 2016’s 266.6 million album project units.  Song consumption units went up 29.5% this year over 2016, 1.5 billion song project units to 1.2 billion. Audio streams have also reached a new high this year, landing at 179.8 billion, up 58.5% over last year.  People have also jumped behind paid subscriptions on services like Spotify and Apple Music.  Paid subscription streams grew 69.3% and accounted for 78.6% of total audio streams in 2017.  This number went up 73.6% over last year. Spotify now has 50 million paid subscriptions.  Apple Music has around 27 million paid subscribers. Album sales saw a 13.9% drop during the first half compared to 2016.  BuzzAngle projected 74 million in album sales over last year’s 86 million. Digital album sales via services like iTunes saw a steeper decline.  This year, consumers have purchased 34.5 million albums over last year’s 45.6 million. Physical album sales also went down this year 2.1% to 39.6 million versus 40.4 million in 2016.  Yet, looking at overall album sales numbers, consumers still prefer to purchase at physical stores.  Physical album sales accounted for 53.4% of all album sales in 2017, up to 46.9% over 2016’s. As with their album counterparts, individual digital tracks experienced a strong decline.  Showing that people have started shifting to streaming en masse, BuzzAngle reported that digital song sales fell 23.8% year-over-year.  However, the American consumer still enjoys downloading songs.  So far this year, digital song sales have reached 313.3 million, however down from 410.9 million in 2016.