Music streams hit 5 trillion in 2025

NEW YORK (AP):

The global music industry hit 5.1 trillion streams in 2025. It’s a new single-year record, up 9.6 per cent from 2024, which held the previous record.

The 2025 Year-End Report from Luminate, an industry data and analytics company that provides insight into changing behaviours across music listenership, stated that the US on-demand audio streams hit 1.4 trillion, a 4.6 per cent increase from last year.

Less than half all US on-demand audio streams – 43 per cent – were from tracks released in the last five years (2021-2025). The exceptions are Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl and Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem, both of which surpassed 5 million album equivalent units in a single year, with sales and streaming combined.

Luminate’s 2025 Mid-Year Report revealed that, though streams of new music – music released in the last 18 months – were slightly down from last year in the US, new Christian/gospel music defied the trend, led by acts like Forrest Frank, Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship. Christian/gospel music has continued to grow stateside: up 18.5 per cent in on-demand audio volume change compared to 2024. Rock grew 6.4 per cent and Latin grew 5.2 per cent.

For Latin music’s growth, Bad Bunny is responsible. His on-demand audio streams totalled 5.3 billion – 4.38 per cent of all Latin on-demand audio streams.

The introduction of high-profile artificial intelligence artistes became a leading music story in 2025. Those include Xania Monet and the rock band The Velvet Sundown. Monet was the first AI act to début on a Billboard radio chart, reaching No. 3 on the Hot Gospel Songs and No. 20 on the Hot R&B Song. Monet earned 125 million global on-demand audio streams last year.

AI country artistes Breaking Rust, with 72.8 million streams, Aventhis and Cain Walker also did well. Breaking Rust’s Walk My Walk hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song sales chart. The vocal phrasing, melodic shape and stylistic DNA came from the Grammy-nominated country artiste, Blanco Brown.

However, R&B and hip hop still lead. In 2025, rap and R&B accounted for 349.9 billion on-demand audio streams. It is followed by rock with 260.5 billion and pop with 167.2 billion. Rounding out the top five is country with 122.5 billion and Latin with 120.9 billion.