Album Sales Drop, Hip-Hop Surges as Pandemic Colors Nielsen Music/MRC Data's Midyear Report: Analysis

billboard.com:

On-demand streaming thrived, rock hit rock bottom and vinyl album sales enjoyed double-digit growth in the first half of 2020.

At midyear with 361.2 million album audio consumption units, the U.S. music industry posted a 9.4% increase from the 330.3 million units tallied by half time 2019, despite having to overcome a bigger-than-expected drop in physical music formats due to the COVID-19 economic downturn, according to a new Nielsen Music/MRC Data report.

Within that, audio on-demand streaming continues to enjoy robust growth due to building at a 16.2% pace for the first half of the year to 419.82 billion streams.