Yes, that’s 7. 1 trillion music streams last year across the world. The stat comes from research firm Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Music Report, which was published this afternoon.
The 7.1tn streams were across audio and video services, with that total up 33.7% year-on-year. Of that total, 4.1tn were on-demand audio song streams, up 22.3%.
Luminate’s report doesn’t state the video total outright, but it’s easy to calculate from its figures for total streams and audio streams.
There were 3tn on-demand video song streams in 2023, up 63.3% from the 1.9tn in 2022. It may be an uncomfortable topic for music rightsholders to think about, but video streams appear to be growing nearly three times faster than audio streams.
436k tracks were streamed more than 1m times globally in 2023, up from 373.5k the previous year. At the other end of the scale, a whopping 45.6m tracks had precisely zero streams in 2023.
Luminate’s ‘Track Streaming Pyramid’ data is very interesting in the light of Spotify’s decision to not pay royalties to tracks until they reach 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months.
According to Luminate’s calculations, 152.2m tracks were streamed less than 1,000 times in 2023. That’s a startling 82.7% of all the audio ISRCs that it tracks for this research.
Most of the report focuses on North America rather than global stats. Luminate says that total on-demand song streams in the US grew by 14.6% to 1.5tn in 2023.
Note, audio accounted for 1.2tn of those (up 12.7%) which is a much bigger share of the total than the global figures. Video streams grew from 0.2tn to 0.3tn – up 50%.
Luminate also noted that catalogue’s share of US music consumption inched upwards from 72.2% in 2022 to 72.6% in 2023, with current releases’ share falling from 27.8% to 27.4%.
(It defines catalogue as albums that are at least 18 months old, have fallen below number 100 on Billboard’s 200 chart in the US, and don’t have a single from the album that is current on any of Billboard’s radio airplay charts.)
There is also data for Canada, where on-demand song streams grew by 18.3% to 145.1bn last year, with catalogue’s share growing from 71.7% in 2022 to 73.1% in 2023.
Luminate has also been digging into the fastest-growing genres in the US, with the top mover being the unhelpfully-vague ‘World’ category: up 26.2% to 5.7bn on-demand audio streams.
Close behind, Latin streams grew by 24.1% to 19.4bn, while country streams grew by 23.7% to 20.4bn.
In the report, Luminate pointed to younger millennial and Gen-Z listeners as fuelling the latter, with streaming now the biggest listening format for artists like Bailey Zimmerman, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen.
Within the catch-all Latin category, Luminate also highlighted 2023 as a breakout year for regional Mexican music in the US. Its streams grew by 60% last year to 21.9bn, fuelled by listening in states in the west and south west of the US with large Hispanic populations.
Overall, though, R&B/Hip-Hop is still the biggest genre in the US, accounting for 25.5% of consumption. That’s ahead of rock (19.9%), pop (12%), country (8.7%) and Latin (6.8%).
The report noted that while catalogue R&B / hip-hop tracks saw their on-demand audio streams grow by 11.3% last year, streams of current titles in these genres fell by 7.1%.
Finally, Luminate has some data on the growth of D2C (direct to consumer) sales of music in the US last year. Vinyl, CD and cassette sales from D2C platforms grew by 38.6% to 11.8m units in 2023, with rock music accounting for 38.6% of those sales (yes, the same percentage).
The company sees superfans as key to this, and claims that 18% of US music listeners fall into this category, spending more than 68% more money on music each month than the average listener, and 126% more on merch.
There is plenty more in the report, and you can register to download a free copy of it here.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools :: Cresqa
Cresqa pitches itself as “your personal content strategy assistant”.
To access this post, you…