Streaming is an area of the music industry that has thrived recently but its success has had an unfortunate side-effect, becoming responsible for a decline in the sales of digital downloads.

New figures from the BPI suggest that digital downloads are now declining at a faster rate than even sales of CDs in the UK and this seems to be a good indication of how the public will be accessing their music in years to come.

Both sales of digital singles and albums have suffered with album sales seeing the biggest decrease, dropping by 8.6% on last year. Although the sale of CDs has been on the decrease for some time, the decline seems to have slowed down considerably, falling by only 4.5%.

In contrast, the figures for streaming have seen a considerably sharp increase, rising by 81.4% in the last year. This speaks volumes for how the British public is now choosing to consume its music.

So what has sparked the rise in popularity of streaming? The streaming market has seen competitors fiercely battle it out recently with heavy weights such as Tidal forcing their way into the market. The publicity that this has generated has drawn even more people towards streaming and the lure of being able to stream for free with ad-supported platforms such as Spotify is too tempting for many people to pass up. The ability to be able to search quickly and easily through thousands of tracks and then build up your own playlist that, in many cases, you can take out on the go with you is also a huge lure for many music fans.

Whatever the exact reasons may be, it’s clear that streaming is the future of the music industry but an area that the BPI statistics reports a somewhat surprising upturn is vinyl. We’re becoming very retro in our old age it seems.