Luminate’s year-end report of music in 2025 is here

Luminate is the tracker of statistics for the music industry in North America. They’ve just released a summary of what happened with music in 2025, focusing mostly on Canada. (Get your copy of the report here.)

Here are some highlights.

• On-demand global audio streams were up 9.6% compared to 2024. The number of songs streamed last year was 5.1 trillion. Yes, with a “T.”
• Total Canadian album consumption (physical albums plus Track Equivalent Albums and Streaming Equivalent albums) was up 4.1%.
• That works out to 150.8 billion songs streamed in Canada last year.
• Basic album sales (physical and digital), down 2.1%
• Canadian total physical album sales (CDs and vinyl): up 3.7% to 3.8 million units.
• 96.2% of all daily uploads to the streaming music services came from independent artists. Only 3.8% came from majors.
• There are 253 million songs available through streaming (the number is most likely much bigger, because this number only includes tracks with ISRC numbers).
• 29 songs were streamed more than a billion times. Another 5,000 were streamed between 100 million and 1 billion.
• In the middle, we have 483,000 songs (1 million to 10 million streams each) that were streamed 1.35 trillion times. (
• At the other end of the scale, 120,500,000 million tracks were streamed less than 10 times.

• In the U.S., R&B and hip-hop received the most streams with 349.9 billion. Rock was a strong second with 260.5 billion. Pop was third at 167.2 billion.
• Rock dead? Nope. Rock streams showed the greatest growth in the streaming space.
• Rock’s number one market outside of the U.S? Canada.

• Canada has 3.3% of the global share of streaming. The U.S. is first, of course (31.0%). Second? Mexico (7.3%) followed by Brazil, Germany, and Japan.
• The biggest platform for rock? Apple Music, by far.
• The number one most-watched music documentary? Becoming Led Zeppelin. And people choose Netflix as the best place for music docs.
• Canada’s number one export market for music is the U.S. R&B/Hip-Hop is the number one export genre. (Interestingly, Australia is also a major importer of Canadian music.)
• Meanwhile, Canada’s imports the most music from the U.S. Pop is the big genre.
• Fake AI artists showed big growth. Death to Cain Walker, Breaking Rust, Xania Money, Juno Skye, and Enily Blue. Delete them.
• 44% of music listeners say they would be less interested in music that was generated by AI.

Finally, let’s look at some specific releases:

• Most-streamed song of 2025 globally: “Die with a Smile” from Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars (2.858 billion)
• The number one video stream globally? “Wheels on the Bus” by CoComelon (2.016 billion).
• Top-selling album in Canada: Morgan Wallen, I’m the Problem (481,000)
• Most-streamed song in Canada: Alex Warren and “Ordinary” (114.5 million).
• Top-selling vinyl record in the US: Taylor Swift, Life of a Showgirl (1,601,000). She also sold 27,000 cassettes.
• Fleetwood Mac moved another 190,000 copies of Rumours (number six overall for the year.)

Like I said, the whole report (and there is so much more investigate) can be found here.