Research firm Luminate has published its mid-year report for 2024, with a raft of stats exploring the continued growth of the recorded music market.
The headline stat: 2.29 trillion. That’s how many on-demand audio streams there were globally in the first six months of 2024, up 15.1% from the same period last year.
The report zeroes in on North America for other stats, reporting that US on-demand audio streams were up 8% in the first half of this year to 665.8bn.
So, the US accounted for just over 29% of global streams, but that share is falling slightly – down from just under 31% a year ago.
One thing that hasn’t changed: the share of US consumption between current and catalogue music. It’s exactly the same as last year: 27.2% is current music and 72.8% catalogue.
Other trends picked out by Luminate in its repoort include Latin music being the fastest growing ‘core’ genre in the US, growing its share of on-demand streaming there by 0.51 percentage points year-on-year.
There were also small rises in share for rock, pop and country, although R&B / Hip-Hop (grouped together as one core genre in Luminate’s methodology) is still the biggest in terms of actual streams.
There is also some analysis of the environment for artists in the US. Luminate noted that 46 artists had more than 1bn US on-demand audio streams in the first half of this year, and 43 of them “had major distribution listed on their most-streamed track”.
Of those with between 10m and 50m streams in that period, 62.3% had major distribution, while of those with 1m-10m streams, 62.1% had independent distribution.
(Yes, there’s an important caveat here, which Luminate explains in its report. “Independent includes all distribution outside major labels or their owned entities” – our bold type. So some of the artists classified as ‘major-distributed’ are exactly that: independent, just putting their music out through the majors’ distribution arms.)
The trend picked out by Luminate here is that independent-distributed artists are increasing their share of each tier of streams: up 0.6 percentage points in the 1m-10m streams tier, up 2.3 points in the 10m-50m tier; up 1.8 points in the 50m-100m tier and so on.
Other talking points we’ve picked out from the report include:
- Live events account for 64% of Americans’ monthly music spend – and Gen Z listeners are the top spenders – to the tune of 23% more spent per month than the average listener.
- Metallica’s Fortnite partnership paid off for the band. Luminate tracked a 20.1% increase in global on-demand audio streams for the six songs featured in the game in the week after the announcement – and 6.2% growth for the rest of their catalogue.
- 76% of American music listeners have watched short-form videos, while 22% of them have posted videos themselves. TikTok is still the most popular short-video platform, but YouTube Shorts is catching up fast, with Facebook and Instagram Reels not too far behind.
- Mexican artists have seen their share of global audio streams grow by 0.74 percentage points this year so far – the biggest rise, ahead of Brazilian artists’ 0.47 points rise. British and American artists saw the biggest decline – 0.59 points and 0.53 points respectively. These are small changes, but significant trends if they continue.
- Take a bow, the Nordics. Norway, Iceland and Sweden are the top three countries in the world for ‘premium streaming share’ – the percentage of overall streams accounted for by paying subscribers. In Norway, that share is 93.5%. India is at the other end of the scale: just 9.7% of its on-demand audio streams came from premium listeners.
- Variants are on the march. The top 10 physical albums released so far in the US in 2024 averaged seven different LP (vinyl) variants, 13 CDs (!) and two cassettes.
- Hats off to Benson Boone. His ‘Beautiful Things’ track was the most-streamed globally (on-demand, audio streams again – this doesn’t include YouTube views for example) with 1.43bn streams in the first half of 2024.
You can download the full mid-year report for free by registering here.