MBW Reacts is a series of analytical commentaries from Music Business Worldwide written in response to major recent entertainment events or news stories. Only MBW+ subscribers have unlimited access to these articles.
The latest music consumption stats are out from industry-standard market monitor, Luminate.
They tell a story of a rapidly changing industry – and how the United States, while still comfortably the world’s largest market, is becoming increasingly less dominant global player.
In fact, now MBW has cast our eye over the full Luminate Midyear Report (download it here), we’d suggest one thing in particular sings out:
Any music company that remains fixated on making ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ hits for the US chart… may want to question the long-term benefit of this strategy.
Here are the conclusions from the Luminate report that led us to this summation.
Conclusion 1: The US market will soon make up less than a quarter of global streams
We already knew that the US market was starting to lose its status as the runaway king of streaming.
The IFPI‘s latest Global Music Report, issued earlier this year, told us so: it revealed that the US, combined with Canada, saw its annual share of global trade revenues fall to 40.3% in 2024 – down from 41.6% just two years prior.
This, however, didn’t tell us what’s happening to music consumption.
With the USA’s per-stream royalties significantly higher than those in other parts of the world, the trade revenues metric arguably downplays how dramatic the shift in actual worldwide fan behavior has become.
“We are observing the continued expansion of global streaming, significantly driven by ex-U.S. markets.”
Rob Jonas, Luminate
According to Luminate’s new report, total on-demand audio streams in the first half of 2025 in the USA stood at 696.6 million.
That was up 4.6% YoY.
Yet, audio streams outside the US jumped by a much bigger margin — up by 12.6% YoY to 1.8 trillion.
Luminate CEO, Rob Jonas, said: “We are observing the continued expansion of global streaming, significantly driven by ex-U.S. markets.”
He ain’t kidding.
Below, based on MBW’s review of historical data, you can see how the USA’s global market share of total audio streams has substantially fallen – down from 43.4% in 2019 to just 27.9% in H1 2025.
The USA’s market share of global audio streaming volume is on course to fall beneath a quarter (25%) in the next year or two.
Conclusion 2: The continuing death of the megahit (!)
The above explains how the USA is losing global market share.
But what about the market share of the most popular music within the USA?
Based on mid-year data, it showed how the USA’s Top 10 biggest tracks of the period were claiming a much smaller overall market share than they once did.
The reason: listener behavior was becoming spread across many more tracks, from many more artists, than was once the case.
The latest Luminate data shows this trend hasn’t reversed.
The biggest track in the USA in the first half of the year was Luther by Kendrick Lamar and SZA.
It racked up 530.4 million audio streams in the Jan-June period, says Luminate.
A hefty volume of plays, for sure – but a smaller total amount than the biggest hits of H1 2023 (Morgan Wallen), H1 2020 (Roddy Ricch), H1 2019 (Lil Nas X), and H1 2018 (Drake).
Meanwhile, according to Luminate, the USA’s Top 10 biggest audio streaming tracks combined in H1 2025 racked up 3.62 billion plays.
According to MBW’s calculations, that was actually down, in volume terms, on the equivalent figures from H1 2024 (3.76 billion) and H1 2023 (3.89 billion) – see below.
Luminate’s H1 2025 list of the Top 10 biggest audio streaming tracks in the USA. (Source: Luminate)
Here’s the critical stat in this section: the USA’s Top 10 tracks in H1 2025 claimed a half-a-percent share of the market’s total audio streams (0.52%).
Go back just a few years, and the equivalent stat was as high as 1.6% (see below).
Conclusion 3: In with the Old, out with the New….
So we’ve demonstrated (see: Conclusion 1) that the USA is losing market share of global streams, and that (see: Conclusion 2), the biggest chart tracks within the USA are losing market share of national streams.
But what about that warning over ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ tracks on the US chart?
This requires nuance.
When a record company or artist has a track like Luther by Kendrick Lamar (or indeed Not Like Us or TV Off, which both also made H1 2025’s Top 10), they can be confident, what with the quality and cultural cachet of the artist, that they are creating ‘evergreen catalog tracks’ which will be streamed long into the future.
But if a label or artist is creating novelty tracks that will get listened to in 2025, but not in, say, 2029, 2039, or 2049?
That’s becoming a much harder game.
According to Luminate’s new report, tracks younger than 18 months old (‘current’ releases) were streamed 168.5 billion times in the first half of 2025.
That was down in volume terms by 3.3% YoY vs. the same period of 2024, when ‘current’ tracks racked up 174.3 billion streams.
To reiterate: ‘current’ music in the USA is seeing its total plays decline, even as the market’s overall streams grow.
Whipping out MBW’s calculator for a second, the above stats seem to indicate:
(a) ‘Current’ tracks claimed a mere 24.2% market share of total US audio streams in H1 2025; and
(b) ‘Catalog’ tracks (those older than 18 months) claimed a whopping 75.8% market share.
Or, in simpler terms: Less than a quarter of every stream in the US these days is of a ‘current’ release.
The most notable decline in ‘current’ release popularity is occurring in the ‘Hip-hop/R&B’ genre.
According to Luminate’s report, total on-demand audio streams of ‘current’ Hip-hop/R&B releases were down by 9.2% YoY in H1 2025 – a real-terms drop of 3.7 billion plays vs. H1 2024.
Despite this, ‘Hip-hop/R&B’ remains the USA’s No.1 genre overall, with 24.6% of total audio streams in the market in the first half of this year.
That was down on 25.8% in the prior-year period.
Meanwhile, the ‘Rock’ genre continues to gain ground.
The USA’s second-biggest genre on audio streaming in H1 2025, it grew market share to 17.7% vs. 17.3% in the prior-year period.Music Business Worldwide
