One of the big shifts in the music industry in the past few years has been hip hop’s emergence as the most popular genre. 2017 data showed this fact for the first time, and the genre’s dominance continued in 2018. These pieces of data are pulled from all album consumption, not just streaming. The streaming numbers are even more hip hop heavy.

The albums listed on the bottom are almost all hip hop. Streaming seems to have taken over as well as the main source of people’s listening. That idea is harder to determine as its near impossible to average how many times people listen to an album or a song download once they own it. Billboard is having a hard time with this in tallying weekly album and song sales by deciding how much one stream counts for.

A few other details from Buzz Angle’s yearly report were that most forms of individual song and album sales are dropping in favor of streaming, except for vinyl. I’ll get into that in another graphic. Also, the genre listed as EDM seems to encompass all of electronic music, not just the sub genre of EDM.