Music Audio Streaming Consumption Grows by 8%

Streaming music consumption isn’t slowing in the US this year, according to the latest report from Luminate.

US on-demand audio streaming consumption reached 665.8 billion streams during the first half of this year, up by 8% from the 2023 H1 figure of 616.5 billion. Despite this healthy rate, the US trailed the global average: during the first half of this year, the number of global on-demand audio streams increased by 15.1% year-over-year to 2.29 trillion.

This suggests that the US accounted for roughly 3 in every 10 on-demand audio streams globally during the first half of this year.

Premium on-demand audio represented the vast majority of total US streaming consumption (including ad-supported audio and on-demand video). Indeed, recent research shows how paid streaming music subscriptions continues to grow.

The report highlights the Latin, Rock, and Pop genres as the fastest-growing by share of US on-demand audio streams.

Total Music Consumption On the Rise

• Total album consumption has expanded again, up by 7.4% year-over-year, while total digital music consumption climbed by a similar 7.5%.
• However, digital album sales fell again, falling by 10.3% to 8.3 million for the first half of this year. Physical album sales, by contrast, grew, increasing by 3.8% to 24.7 million.
• Rock accounted for a leading 36.4% of total album sales and 37.8% of physical album sales; while R&B/Hip-Hop represented a leading 25.9% share of on-demand streams, topping all genres for both audio (25.8% share) and video (26.5%) streams.

Here are the tops of the charts in the US for the first half of the year:

• Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” was the top album by total consumption, with 4.660 billion total album-equivalent consumption, almost triple the #2 album.
• Taylor Swift’s album also led the way in total (physical+digital) album sales, with 2.474 million. The artist also had the fourth and fifth best-selling albums, “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” and “Lover” as well as the 8th-best selling (“folklore“) and 10th best-selling (“Midnights“).
• Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” emerged as the leading song as measured by song sales, on-demand audio streams, and on-demand video streams.
• Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” also topped the charts for on-demand streams (audio + video).
• Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” led the way in vinyl album sales, almost reaching 1 million (988,000). The artist had 6 of the top 10 albums by vinyl sales.

For more, download the report here.