iTunes is still the most preferred music platform in the US, survey says
At this point, it seems clear that streaming services will be the dominant way people consume music going forward. If anything, we might have hit that point already: A January report from Nielsen found that Americans got more music from on-demand streaming than from digital downloads in 2016.
But while the future of music downloads may look bleak, this chart from Statista suggests it's still too soon to write off the format completely. According to a recent survey of roughly 10,000 consumers by PayPal and SuperData Research, the service that popularized digital album sales, Apple's iTunes, is still the most popular music platform in the US. Leading streaming services Pandora and Spotify come in second and third.
The finding might not mean much - PayPal points to iTunes' popularity among "non-millennials" for its place atop the list, and Apple itself continues to invest in its own streaming service - but it does go to show just how enduring Apple's changes to the music business have been.
