Music creator survey Career: Need versus want

Mark Mulligan

February 2026

This report is the second of two reports analysing the results of MIDiA’s 2025 global music creator survey, following Music creator survey | Creation: Rise of the new breed. While the former analyses music creation behaviours, this report focuses on music creators’ careers.

This report has five key sections:

Music creators: the number of creators, their roles, and their income sources
Distribution: distributors used, why they chose them, and creators’ ideal career partner
Non-DSP: creators that are posting to non-DSP platforms and why they do so
Career: goals and challenges of creators, their ranking of platforms for fan building
Segmentation: profiling creators by career aspiration and professionalism

In our survey we asked creators to state their sophistication level from: beginner, intermediate, advanced to expert. We then scored these from one to four and used the resulting scores for the sophistication meter graphic.

Although there is a lot of data in this report, there is even more in the Excel published alongside it.

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