By next year, on-demand streaming will match online video as Americans' main source of digital music

Less than four years ago, Spotify wasn’t even available in the U.S., and Beats Music was still a headphones company.

But the former has since grown to more than 50 million active users, and the latter was sold to Apple for billions.

Now, according to NielsenSoundscan, on-demand audio streaming from these services are growing 10 percent faster than streams from video sites like YouTube.

At this rate, on-demand streaming will have caught up with online video as Americans’ primary source of digital music consumption by the end of next year.

Nielsen Music tracked 164 billion On-Demand streams in 2014, up 54% in 2013 (106 billion). They did not include Pandora streams in their calculations.

“Music fans continue to consume music through on-demand streaming services at record levels, helping to offset
some of the weakness that we see in sales,” said David Bakula the senior vice president for industry insights at Nielsen. “The continued expansion of digital music consumption is encouraging.”

Streaming salvaged a positive growth rate for overall digital music consumption in the face of declining regular sales. Overall digital consumption hit 320 million units,  up 3.7 percent from 2013 (the industry counts 1500 streams as equivalent to a full album).

But digital track sales fell 12..5 percent in 2014, while digital album sales fell 9.4 percent.

Here are the most popular songs on on-demand audio for 2014, according to Nielsen SoundScan’s algorithm…

And the most streamed videos.

Rob covers business, economics and the environment for Fusion. He previously worked at Business Insider. He grew up in Chicago.