Global Music Industry Hit 4.1 Trillion Streams in 2023 – But Where Does That Leave Australia?

We're consuming more music than ever before, never mind that streaming services are pushing up subscription fees.

The global music industry clicked over 4.1 trillion audio streams in 2023, up 22.3 percent from 2022, and setting a new record for a single-year achievement. With audio and video combined, song streams hit 7.1 trillion, up 33.7 percent from 5.3 trillion.

That’s according to US market monitor Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Report, released January 11, which looked at both the US and some global markets.

Taylor Swift accounted for 1.79 percent of on-demand streams in the US, or about one in 78. She was largely responsible for album purchases Stateside going up 12.6 percent to 1.1 billion units. Altogether, female artist representation in audio stream volume within the Top 500 most streamed artists in the US expanded by 4.2 percent.

Newer Markets

With the entertainment biz becoming more international, streaming has brought in newer markets into the mix, slowly pushing Australia out of the spotlight.For instance, in terms of audio and video streaming volume, the US retained its lead with 1.45 trillion, which is 40 percent in front of India, which was at #2 with 1.037 trillion, and close to four times as much as Brazil, which was at #3 with 373.5 billion.

The rest of the Top 10 was:

4. Mexico: 366.5 billion
5. Indonesia; 235.5 billion
6. Germany: 217.6 billion
7. Japan: 209.0 billion
8. UK: 204.7 billion
9. Canada: 145.3 billion
10. France: 136.98 billion

But the list of highest rate of growth year-on-year reflected more new players, which could be problematic in the future for Australia.

In this list, India beat the United States, Indonesia overtook Brazil, and Mexico registered more new streams than Japan and the Republic of Korea. Turkey was at #8, flourishing at a faster speed than The Philippines and the UK, which was at #10.

Over 436,000 tracks were streamed one million or more times globally in 2023, up 16.7 percent from 373,500 tracks in 2022.

In the US, more people tuned into what is called “world music”, a vague term which incorporated K-Pop, J-Pop and Afrobeat, which expanded by 26.2 percent to 5.7 billion streams.

All Latin styles advanced by 24.1 percent to 19.4 billion (six Latin artists broke 1 billion audio streams), and country music was up 23.7 percent to 20.4 billion aided by its new generation of superstars as Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs and Zach Bryan. Comedy, new age and children’s music fell in popularity among streamers.

Luminate’s figures showed that more global music fans are listening to non-English music. The share of English language on-demand audio and video in the top 10,000 Global Tracks continued to decline since 2021 (from 67 percent to 54.9 percent), while Spanish language was at second spot (10.1), Hindi a huge jump to 7.8 percent from 3.8 percent, with Korean at 2.4 percent and Japanese at 2.1 percent.

This is a mixture of Gen Z’s music tastes going more global as the internet and social media gives them a more international perspective than their elders, and the effect of greater migration.

In the US, a combination of pure album sales, track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums, hip hop was the most popular with a 25.3 percent share. Following were rock (19.4), pop (12.3), country (8.4) and Latin (6.9).

It was a different story for pure album sales by themselves. Rock led with a 41.5 percent, far ahead of hip hop at #2 with a 12.9 percent share. Country was #4 with a 7.8 share, and world – spearheaded by K-Pop – had a #5 placing with a 6.9 percent share.

Album sales in the US made a comeback in 2023 after a drop in 2022. They upsurged 5.2 percent, with physical (vinyl and CD) flourished by 8.9 percent to 87 million while digital album sales shrunk 9.3 percent to 18.3 million.

Consumers Tick

The Luminate report also did a deep-dive into what made consumers tick. Fans of J-Pop, for instance, generated 1.67 billion streams in the US. 95 percent of them were more likely to be Gen Z-ers (aged 13 to 24), and 94 percent more likely to be members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Multilingual music listeners are more likely to discover music via movie soundtracks, exclusive TV shows from streaming platforms and video games. They are likely to choose a streaming service which programs more global artists.

Live music fans are 170 percent more likely to attend a virtual concert than the average U.S. music listener (mostly from recommendations from family and friends), while Gen Z will tune into one if the artist is debuting new music.