The US record industry revenues grew to $9.8 billion in 2018 thanks to the continuing boom of music streaming services.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have released their annual report for 2018’s music industry in the US. It showed that music streaming continues to bring reinvigorated life to the music with 12% overall growth thanks mostly to streaming revenues.

Free music streaming helped music streaming to become mainstream and as the services offering music streaming get more popular free streaming is slowly being phased out. Last year was the first time that paid subscriptions represented over half of all revenues accounting for $5.4 billion and rising 32 percent.

All forms of music streaming combined accounted for 75% of the total revenues, roughly $7.4 billion. Digitally downloaded music from services like iTunes and Amazon accounted for 11% of the revenues. Surprisingly physical music sales like CDs and records accounted for 12% of the revenues despite their downward trend in recent years.

Ad-supported streaming like Spotify free and YouTube saw $760 million of revenues with 15% in growth. Digital radio services represent a large part of the US music industry in 2018 with services like Pandora growing 32% for total revenues up to $1.2 billion.