Reports: Music streaming

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Breaking saturation
Music streaming pricing strategy

Cover image for Breaking saturation

Tatiana Cirisano and Perry Gresham

April 2025

Labels

Subscriptions

Streaming

Nearly two decades into the streaming era, established subscription markets like the US are approaching saturation. While growth pockets for standard subscriptions remain, the next stage is about raising average revenue per user through both price increases and user segmentation.

Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

Cover image for Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024

Olivia Jones

March 2025

Streaming

Marketing

Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

Recorded music market shares 2024
Widening gaps

Cover image for Recorded music market shares 2024

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

March 2025

Music revenue

Streaming

Spotify

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.

Music streaming consumer profile Q4 2024
Stabilisation and fandom slowdown

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

February 2025

Willingness to pay

Music consumers

Streaming

Consumer music behaviours are both stabilising and showing signs of coming change. Change that could be challenging for all music business stakeholders, especially with regards to fandom monetisation. This report presents data-focused visuals and impactful analysis of trends and anomalies that will inform your understanding of what is happening to today’s music consumer, why it is happening, and where these trends are heading.

Audio’s entertainment value
Examining audio listeners’ cross-entertainment lives

Cover image for Audio’s entertainment value

Rutger Rosenborg

February 2025

music industry

Music streaming

Content

Typically, the marketing team for a games company or TV show would not be thinking of audiobooks and podcast listeners as a key consumer segment to address. Yet, podcast and audiobook listeners are digitally sophisticated and spend more time and money than the consumer average on most forms of entertainment – including games, music, and video.

Latent potential
Japan music consumer user profile

Cover image for Latent potential

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

September 2023

Music streaming

Audience Insight

This report presents MIDiA consumer data for key music behaviours of Japan’s consumers. The data covered includes streaming app usage, social app usage, key audio formats (radio, streaming, and podcasts), fandom / identity, and artist content. All data is from our Q1 2023 survey, fielded in US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, Germany, and UK.

Recorded music market 2022
Reality bites

Cover image for Recorded music market 2022

Mark Mulligan

March 2023

TuneCore

Music streaming

Kobalt

Following a spectacular year of growth in 2021, global recorded music revenue growth slowed significantly in 2022, due to the combined impact of global economic headwinds and growth slowdown in mature streaming markets. Context, though, is everything – not many industries can deliver solid growth while the global economy is in turmoil, ad markets are falling, and many emerging tech sectors are in crisis.

Music’s Instagram moment
The social music creation revolution

Cover image for Music’s Instagram moment

Tatiana Cirisano

March 2023

Consumer behaviour

Apple

Spotify

Social media has steadily integrated music, and music creation tools have steadily become more social. These trends are converging, accelerated by shifts in consumer behaviour and artificial intelligence (AI). The result could be a new set of music creation and re-creation tools, integrated within social platforms and geared towards casual consumers.

Closing the background gap
Focused versus background audio listening

Cover image for Closing the background gap

Kriss Thakrar, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

November 2022

Spotify

Radio

YouTube

The rise of attention inflation means that consumers are maximising their limited time by multitasking between various formats, spurring a rise in background consumption. This creates a “new” space for platforms to compete for consumers’ time. Among entertainment formats, audio is best placed to conquer background listening, but music streaming is more easily relegated to the background than podcasts.

A field of all levels
Strategizing music’s attention economy

Cover image for A field of all levels

Tatiana Cirisano

November 2022

Consumer behaviour

Music creators

Record labels

Over roughly the past decade, each stage in the evolution of the attention economy accelerated the pace of fragmentation and oversaturation in music, unearthing new challenges for each micro-generation of artists. With all these generations now competing in the same playing field, artist strategy depends strongly on the era in which they rose to prominence.

The future of music
The rise of a counterculture industry

Cover image for The future of music

Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

June 2022

Consumer behaviour

Spotify

Music creators

Music streaming and the attention recession have turned music into a background activity. Artists en masse are struggling to cut through the noise, realising that streaming is neither a place to build deeper relationships with fans nor to generate meaningful income.

Music catalogue acquisition
Picking apart the $5 billion competition for icons

Cover image for Music catalogue acquisition

Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

March 2022

investment

Music streaming

music catalogue

A variety of economic factors and stock market volatility during the coronavirus pandemic helped establish music as an attractive asset class for institutional investors. With labels, publishers, institutional investors, and newly launched funds now competing for the same diminishing pool of evergreen catalogue, competition and prices are high.

Music market subscriber shares 2021
Growth is not letting up yet

Cover image for Music market subscriber shares 2021

Mark Mulligan

December 2021

Subscriptions

Streaming

Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report, with quarterly data (from Q4 2015 to Q1 2021) and annual label trade revenue (from FY 2015 to FY 2020) for more than 20 streaming services across 34 different markets.

Karaoke app user deep dive

Cover image for Karaoke app user deep dive

Mark Mulligan

November 2021

Streaming Music

apps

mobile apps

This report presents data concerning karaoke app users. This data is taken from MIDiA’s Q3 2021 consumer survey. The online survey comprised 9,000 respondents across the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Brazil, South Korea. All country level samples were nationally representative with a 1,000 sample in each market.

Independent Artists
Pathfinding Through a Pandemic

Cover image for Independent Artists

Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling

September 2020

artist income

Independent artists

Music streaming

2019 was yet another stand-out year for independent artists, with revenues, streams and market shares all growing strongly. Then, along came COVID-19 and the world turned upside down. However, in lockdown many independent artists found new opportunities and the ability to innovate and create.

Music Subscriber Market Shares 4.0
Subscriptions Decouple from Revenue

Cover image for Music Subscriber Market Shares 4.0

Mark Mulligan

September 2020

Subscriptions

Streaming

Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report with quarterly data from Q4 2015 to Q1 2020 and annual label trade revenue from full year 2015 to full year 2019 for 27 streaming services across 34 different markets.

Recovery Economics
Outlook for Music, Games, Video & Sports

Cover image for Recovery Economics

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin and Alistair Taylor

June 2020

Video

Recorded music

Music streaming

MIDiA analysts present in this webinar report how the entertainment industries can plan not to simply bounce back, but to rebuild their value propositions and supply chains to adjust to the realities of the new normal and flourish in the post-lockdown era.

COVID-19
The Self-Isolation Entertainment Boom

Cover image for COVID-19

Mark Mulligan

April 2020

Streaming

Spotify

Artists

Following our first COVID-19 impact report, this report deep dives into how media consumption patterns have changed in the initial weeks of COVID-19 dislocation. While it is crucial to remember that these behaviour shifts are a snapshot of a unique moment in time, there are nonetheless some that will persist post-pandemic.

Ad Receptiveness Consumer Survey
Country Snapshots

Cover image for Ad Receptiveness Consumer Survey

Mark Mulligan

March 2020

Subscriptions

Marketing

Music streaming

Ad receptiveness consumer snapshots for US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, Sweden, France, Netherlands, and Italy.

Music Subscriber Market Shares 3.0
The Big Three Dominate

Cover image for Music Subscriber Market Shares 3.0

Mark Mulligan

December 2019

Subscriptions

Streaming

Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report with quarterly data from Q4 2015 to Q2 2019 for 23 streaming services across 30 different markets. Companies...

1
2
3
›

Showing 1 to 20 of 49 results.