These 5 trends show where music and streaming are headed in 2025

Some of the biggest music stories in 2024 revealed inalienable truths. Kendrick beat Drake, once and for all; on the heels of her Eras Tour, the highest-grossing tour in history, Taylor Swift is the biggest Pop star in the world; and people like their Pop music served country-fried, as evidenced by Shaboozey’s massive “A Bar Song” and Post Malone’s Nashville-forward album F-1 Trillion.

But that’s the tip of the iceberg of what streaming and record sales data can reveal about where the industry is headed. Luckily, Luminate—the analytics firm whose data powers the Billboard charts—is the keeper of the keys on everything from streaming numbers and live music attendance to ascendant genres and the listening patterns of emerging markets. The media-data company had a lot of numbers to work with—in 2024, global streams reached nearly 5 trillion. Here are five key takeaways from Luminate’s year-end music report that forecast where music is going in 2025.

1. The pop girlies are just getting started

When it came to hot genres, by mid 2024, the year was looking a lot like 2023—with Latin music seeing the strongest listener growth in the U.S. But a lot can change in six months. Led by solo female performers, pop music triumphed. With Taylor Swift (12.8 billion streams) and Billie Eilish (4.5 billion streams) leading the pack, women solo acts occupied seven pop’s 10 most-streamed artists in the U.S. There were 47 female pop artists in the genre’s top 100 artists—including Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan—yet they drove nearly two out of every three songs streamed. 

Pop may have experienced the steepest rise, but as far as genre popularity goes, R&B and hip-hop still hold court. “Just about one in every four audio streams last year was R&B/hip-hop,” said Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s VP of music insights and industry relations, on a recent webinar. Still, the battle for genre primacy rages on, with country seeing significant upticks in 2024 thanks to international markets. Since last year, Marconette continued, R&B and hip-hop’s overall “piece of the streaming pie is actually down 2.3 percentage points.”

2. Gen Z will shell out for a concert

If streaming allows artists to build a fanbase, then that fandom manifests at live performances. This past year, Gen Z unseated millennials for the first time as the biggest live music spenders, with the younger cohort specifically driven by music festivals more than any other demographic. In the second quarter—typically when festival tickets go on sale ahead of the summer season—Gen Z spent an average of $38 per month on live events, which is 23% higher than the average listener. Although millennials have been dethroned, they continue to spend more on individual concerts than the festival-prone Gen Zers.

Despite Gen Z’s predilection towards festivals, Luminate’s data indicates that across all music listeners, the increasing price of live events is the largest barrier to entry, with 68% of live music goers citing ticket cost as something keeping them from attending concerts—the highest percentage in the history of Luminate’s audience reporting. According to the U.S. News & World Report, music festivals in 2024 cost between $200 and $600 on average, not counting additional expenses for travel, food, and lodging. Meanwhile, Pollster reports that last year’s 100 top music tours averaged $122.84.

3. TV, short-form, and video games fuel music discovery

What people watch has long influenced what they listen to, but Luminate’s Streaming Viewership model is able to track the minutes watched of the year’s most popular music documentaries and offer insight into how viewership leads directly to streams.

The eponymous Beach Boys documentary, for example, resulted in the legacy act seeing two bumps in streaming: one when the documentary was announced and another at the time of its release. “People watch the documentary and then they go listen to the music,” Marconette said. TV is particularly influential for millennials, who are 30% more likely than the average listener to discover music through streamers’ exclusive TV shows.

Among other forms of content like short-form video, livestreams, and gaming, the endless permutations of genre and platform are ripe for different types of music discovery. In the U.S., fans of J-Pop are 73% more likely than average to discover music on platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok, whereas Afropop fans are 188% more likely to make their own discoveries on Twitch than the average listener. Video games, meanwhile, lead fans to more hip-hop and rap, with those genre’s listeners 87% more likely to find music through games than the average listener.

4. International listeners are boosting streamers’ bottom lines

In 2024, the global music industry hit 4.8 trillion streams—a single-year record and a year-on-year increase of 14%. Perhaps more remarkably, that jump represents a 75% increase in on-demand audio streams since 2022.

But streaming isn’t just a volume game—strong results and, streamers say, higher royalties, are driven by ad-free, subscription-based streaming. International markets are showing growth, but the markets that stream the most aren’t necessarily adopting premium plans proportional to their listening. Brazil, for example ranks No. 4 in total streaming, but 34th in premium growth.

Latin America has led overall international premium growth since 2021, but in 2024 Asia, followed by Eastern Europe led international premium growth. At the top of the pack was Turkey, which saw a 17.8% jump in premium streams, followed by Croatia (16.1%, Romania, Malaysia, South Korea, and Slovakia).

5. Global music drives cultural exchange—with some limitations

Growth in international streaming has given Luminate a trove of data that can help quantify the ways in which globalized music drives cultural exchange. This year, the debuted its Export Power Score, which ranks countries’ ability to export music globally based on factors that include artist streaming rank, a country’s market share, and the total number of countries listening to international artists.

“You can use these metrics to really start evaluating the cultural impact that happens through music from a country, but you can also analyze some different trade relationships,” Marconette said.

For several countries, language is a determining factor, with their top importers of content often sharing the same language. But in English-speaking markets, English-language artists are losing streaming share to non-English acts. In the U.S., artists from Mexico and Chile are making gains, while Indian artists showed streaming increases in the U.K. and Australia. Additionally, country made gains in English-speaking international markets in 2024, and Latin music found popularity in Portugal.

In one area of cultural exchange, all roads lead back to one American artist in particular. Swedish songwriters Max Martin and Shellback were two of 2024’s most-streamed songwriters, but not because they were behind a breakout artist from last year like Chappell Roan’s songwriting collaborator Dan Nigro (No. 4). But both contributed heavily to 1989, which Taylor Swift re-released at the end of 2023, helping make them some of last year’s hottest songwriters—with Swift leading the pack.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91265397/music-streaming-trends-2024-2025?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss