Reports: Music revenue

After a buoyant 2023, recorded music revenue growth slowed again in 2024, the fourth year of alternating growth rates. It was a year of varied fortunes across both formats and labels, but perhaps most crucially of all, a growing divergence between label streaming growth and DSP growth.

This report presents the key figures, trends and drivers of MIDiA’s music forecast model. The figures presented in this report are retail values and in billions of US dollars unless otherwise stated. An Excel file posted alongside this report provides complete country-level data, including DSP market shares and a detailed methodology statement.

In a few short years streaming has gone from being an interesting sideshow to the most important component of the recorded music market in terms of impact, innovation and disruption, though not in revenue terms. Indeed streaming still only represents 16% of all recorded music revenue but its growth is directly impacting virtually every other aspect of the industry.

Total revenue growth in streaming heartland markets in 2012 and 2013 painted a strong picture for the streaming era. But by 2014 much of that growth had transformed into decline. Neither trends provide definitive evidence for the case for streaming but both point to the wafer thin margins between growth and decline in the music market.

2013 was the recorded music industry’s 14th successive year of revenue decline. The prolonged death rattle of the CD continues to drag the global market down with it and things just got worse with the paid download entering its own tailspin. Streaming and Subscriptions are the great hope and are growing at unprecedented rates.

The 21st century decline in recorded music revenues continues to send shockwaves throughout the music industry and although there are encouraging signs of digital-driven growth, the impact on artists is less clear. The concentration of the majority of recorded music revenue around a small share of musical works has led to the emergence a Superstar artist economy.

Since the advent of piracy artists have been told that they need not worry about declining music sales because their core business is making money from live and merchandise. At a headline level, macro music industry revenues appear to support the argument, but those numbers give little indication of the income that actually flows back to the artist nor of the impact of the hyper-concentration of revenue among the top 1% of artists.