We have the mid-year global music report. How are things going?
Luminate, one of the monitors of music consumption worldwide, has just released its mid-year report for 2024. Let’s go through a few numbers.
- So far this year, the people have earth have listened to 2.29 TRILLION streams of songs. That’s up 15.1% from last year.
- In Canada, the number is 70.7 billion. That’s up 11.4% from a year ago.
- Canadians have consumed 54.8 billion albums and their equivalents, up 9.8% from 2023.
- Canadian physical album sales are head by 2.1% to 1.59 million (a pathetically small number compared to the Olden Days, but whatever…)
What I find interesting is that the market share for catalogue music (i.e. song that are at least 18 months older) continues to grow. While 26.6% of all streams are to current songs, catalogue listening occupies 73.4%, up about 1% from last year.
There’s a difference when it comes to albums. Catalogue album consumption is now at 40.2 million, up from 36.2 million. Meanwhile, current album consumption is up 6.6% to 14.6 million.
In the US, on-demand audio streaming is up by 8.0%, album consumption is up by 7.4%, and physical sales are up by 3.8%. Americans also prefer catalogue material to current 72.8% vs 27.2%. That’s exactly the same ratio as this time last year.
And to show how global streaming has become, the US accounts for 29% of all streams. A year ago, that share was 31%.
There were small gains for rock, pop, and country. However, hip-hop and R&B–which are for some reason grouped together in this study–still leads the way.
You can read more of a summary right here.
