Music streams hit 4 trillion in 2023; hip-hop still rules

LOS ANGELES (AP):

Listened to more music last year? You’re not alone.

The global music industry surpassed four trillion streams in 2023, a new single-year record, Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Report found.

Global streams were also up 34 per cent from last year, reflective of an increasingly international music marketplace.

In the United States, three genres saw the biggest growth in 2023: country (23.7 per cent); Latin (which encompasses all Latin musical genres, up 24.1 per cent) and world (a catchall that includes J-pop, K-pop and Afrobeats, up 26.2 per cent).

However, when it comes to overall music consumption in the US, hip-hop continues to rule, accounting for 25.5 per cent of all streams.

Maybe it had something to do with hip-hop celebrating its 50-year anniversary in 2023, because streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts dropped 7.1 per cent from 2022, while catalogue streams — older material — grew 11.3 per cent.

It seems that more Americans are listening to non-English music. By the end of 2023, Luminate found that Spanish-language music’s share of the top 10,000 songs streamed in the US grew 3.8 per cent, and English-language music’s share dropped 3.8 per cent.

Under the Latin umbrella, regional Mexican music saw massive growth. The genre term — which encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other styles — grew 60 per cent in US on-demand audio streams, accounting for 21.9 billion. Four of the six Latin artistes to break one billion audio streams in the US were Mexican acts: Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H, and Fuerza Regida, who also placed in the top 125 artistes streamed.

Armado and Peso Pluma’s Ella Baila Sola surpassed a billion streams on Spotify in less than a year and became the first regional Mexican Top 10 hit on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100, peaking at No. 4 — later, Bad Bunny’s collaboration with Grupo Frontera, Un x100to, hit No. 5.

Taylor Swift made up 1.79 per cent of the US market, Luminate found, accounting for one in every 78 US on-demand audio streams. On Luminate’s 2023 top albums chart, Swift accounts for five of the top 10 albums in the US.