music forecasts

Global Recorded Music Revenues Reach $36.2 Billion in 2024 Amid Slower Growth

Tsion Tadesse

13 Mar 2025

Non-major labels gain share for third consecutive year, as streaming revenue growth decelerates [London — Thursday, 13 March 2025] — Global recorded music revenues rose to $36.2 billion in 2024, marking a 6.

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The paradox of scale and success: What music can learn from gin distilleries

Hanna Kahlert

14 May 2025

Business Strategy Music Marketing

The digital world is becoming less reliable. Platforms are flooded with AI content ranging from banal, to amusing, to concerningly incorrect . Advertising crowds the feed alongside creators desperately trying to sell something: themselves, a lifestyle, products, businesses.

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Q2 2024 music market metrics: bifurcation is here

Mark Mulligan

19 Sep 2024

Music streaming Streaming Bifurcation

There are so many music industry metrics and financial results flying around these days that it can be difficult to keep up with them all. Don’t worry, we’ve got you. MIDiA has just published the first edition of a brand-new report series: quarterly music metrics.

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Music isn’t getting worse, genre is

Mark Mulligan

10 Jul 2024

genre music genre Music culture

A couple of weeks ago Rick Beato put out a video titled “ The real reason why music is getting worse” . The core arguments centre around too many people making music, and tech making it both easier to make music and for people to be lazy creators.

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The music business is splitting in two. Here’s why songwriters are reinventing their role

Tatiana Cirisano

24 Jul 2025

Business Strategy music industry songwriters

When systems fail, there are two options: try to fix what is broken, or build something new. In our ’s landmark ‘bifurcation theory’ report , MIDiA pinpointed a new class of music creators taking the latter path.

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The audio listener is too valuable for the music industry to ignore

Rutger Rosenborg

13 Feb 2025

Fandom Spotify US

On the heels of positive Q4 2024 financials for Spotify , the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has not lost a step in holding the company accountable for what it sees as unauthorised music usage.

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MIDiA Research 2024-2031 global subscription video forecasts

Tim Mulligan, Ben Woods and Mark Qi

30 May 2024

Business Strategy

MIDiA’s global subscription video forecasts captures a broad view of the market. With limited video subscriber growth remaining in the West, revenue growth will be fuelled by price rises and increased diversity of monetisation models, such as the introduction of lower cost, ad-supported tiers.

H1 2025 music metrics
Mixed fortunes

Olivia Jones and Mark Mulligan

26 Sep 2025

Labels Streaming live

The first six months of 2025 marked the fourth successive year of slowing H1 growth rates for the music industry companies tracked by MIDiA. There are big shifts beneath the surface, including a widening gap between label and DSP revenue growth, and Asian labels continuing to diverge from Western major labels in their income mix.

Anti-algorithm, anti-perfection - the rise of a music counter-culture

Mark Mulligan

20 Dec 2024

SoundCloud Scenes Music

Today’s music landscape is one defined by abundance and immediacy. In today’s chronically-online world, everything is over-ground, immediately. Scenes have to work really hard to be underground and even then, some eagle-eyed A+R or marketing person is going to see the buzz and try to bottle its ...

Music discovery is not dead, just evolving – the industry needs to evolve with it

Olivia Jones

9 May 2025

Audience Insight Music streaming Social media

Music streaming algorithms have changed the way we listen to music – for better and for worse. While the radio used to be the main way to find new music, streaming and social algorithms now drive discovery as listeners crave (and have come to expect) more personalised recommendations.

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BE THE CHANGE
Gender equity in music

Hanna Kahlert, Tatiana Cirisano, Sophia Oleksiyenko, Ashleigh Millar, Samuel Griffin and Kazia Rothwell

8 Mar 2024

Free Report

Business Strategy Audience Insight

In many ways, women ruled the music industry in 2023. Women swept the 2024 Grammy Awards, winning all the “big four” categories. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé completed record-breaking tours and, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the share of women artists on Billboard’s US Hot 100 year-end chart reached a 12-year high of 35%.

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Social is eating entertainment
The future of memes, music, social platforms, and beyond

Hanna Kahlert

15 Oct 2024

Product Strategy

Entertainment is now a key reason consumers engage with social platforms, opening new opportunities for social and raising new challenges for traditional entertainment. Social platforms offer not only a place to consume original content IP, but to create content around it, engage with the content discussing and unpacking it, and interact with other...

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MIDiA Research 2024–2030 global podcast forecasts
Road to a $10 billion business

Mark Qi and Rutger Rosenborg

28 Mar 2024

Business Strategy

The temporary digital consumption boom of the pandemic gave way to an inflationary landscape fuelled by global supply chain issues and geopolitical crises. While inflation levelled out in 2023, the residual effects of post-pandemic economics continued to reverberate throughout media and tech.

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Music catalogue market 2.0
Bringing yesterday’s hits into the business of tomorrow

Tatiana Cirisano and Olivia Jones

6 May 2025

BMG Round Hill Music T-pain

The music catalogue acquisition market bounced back from a slightly cooled 2023 with a new fever in 2024. What is being bought is changing, however, as investors look to diversify their portfolios and uncover new growth pockets in an increasingly crowded market.

Built for the split: how Create Music Group is positioning itself for a bifurcated industry

Tatiana Cirisano

15 May 2025

Business Strategy Music music industry

The music industry is entering a new phase – less a fork in the road, than a slow but steady divergence . On one path sits the traditional record label model, which monetises music rights via scale of streams.

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What happens to music when fan-made content eclipses the original IP?

Tatiana Cirisano

5 Dec 2024

Music Fandom Music fandom

Last week, MIDiA’s Ben Woods delivered a message to the entertainment industry: nurture fandom or risk losing control of your IP . For years, the way in which consumers engage with their favourite artists, movies, TV shows, and games has become ever more about participation.

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Music in podcasts: Engaging superfans with a new album campaign strategy

Rutger Rosenborg

23 Oct 2024

Podcasts Streaming music podcasts

MIDiA has covered music’s big podcasting opportunity extensively. Per our June 2024 report, “ Defining podcast taste: The universal appeal of music, news, and comedy ”, music is one of the top podcast topics in the world; however, podcasting’s role in music marketing has yet to fully materia...

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The future of music streaming
Change or be changed

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

13 Oct 2025

Streaming Music streaming Business Strategy

This report presents MIDiA’s vision for the long-term future of music streaming. While there are clearly pressing, near-term priorities, these are sustaining innovations aimed at optimising the existing model. In this report, we shift perspectives to the long view, identifying the challenges of today that must be met in order to secure a vibrant ...

Social came for music streaming’s lunch – now is the time for streaming to bite back

Tatiana Cirisano

27 Feb 2025

Audience Insight Spotify Facebook

In the battle of music streaming versus social, the major (at least Western) music streaming services have never fully committed to implementing social features. Spotify has come the closest: an early version offered direct messaging, and the company even acquired a handful of social media-related s...

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Music merchandise demand
Who, what, and where

Tatiana Cirisano

24 Oct 2024

Consumer behaviour cds Spotify

The music merchandise market has transformed, with significantly more artists selling merch and more product variety than ever before. The traditional line between “hard” and “soft” merch is blurring as new generations buy vinyl as a collectible keepsake, rather than a consumption format.