As millions of people all over the world practice social distancing and self-isolation in order to slow the spread of COVID-19, there was an expectation that music streaming would rise just like time spent on Netflix and video games.
It turns out, the opposite has happened. As Billboard notes, music streaming was down 3.5 percent on the week ending on March 19.
The previous week, music streaming went from 25.55 billion streams down to 25.3 billion, a 1 percent decline. Despite some major releases from artists like The Weeknd and Lil Uzi Vert in recent weeks, catalog music (songs that are older than 18 months) are actually doing better than current music (songs released within the last 18 months).