(Hypebot) — A new Luminate Year End Music Report is rightfully making headlines with its findings. Eye-catching stats like “Taylor Swift Made Up 1.7% of Total U.S. Music Market in 2023” make for great headlines, but mean little to the majority of musicians.
So, we combed through the full Luminmate Report to find the data that matters to the rest of the music ecosystem, and here is what we found:
There’s more competition than ever.
- An average of 103.5K new ISRCs (tracks) were delivered to DSPs daily in 2023, up 10.8% from 2022, when an average of 93.4K was uploaded daily.
- Total on-demand song streams (audio and video) totaled 7.1 trillion, up 33.7% compared to 2022. But the jump is not only about TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. On-demand audio-only streams were up 22.3%
- 436K tracks were streamed 1M or more times globally, up from 373.5K in 2022
- 45.6M tracks had zero streams
Fans still buy physical music.
Direct-to-fan sales of vinyl and CDs both grew in 2023.
- CD sales hit 3.9M units, up from 3.5M
- Vinyl sales hit 6.8M, up from 4.9M
Super Fans spend even more.
The 18% of fans classified as Super Fans are increasingly the focus of labels and music marketers because, compared to the average US music listener, they spend:
- 68% more money each month on music
- 126% more on artist merch
- 76% more on physical music
Passionate Fanbases are Most Likely to Use Community-Focused Platforms like Discord and Patreon.
- 13% of U.S. Gen Z Indie Rock fans also report a willingness to directly fund an artist via services like Venmo, CashApp, or Patreon, making them +225% more likely to do this than the average U.S. music listener
The genre of music that you make matters.
- The three fastest growing music genres were World +26.2%, Latin +24.7%, and County 23.7%
- The Comedy, New Age, and Children’s genres declined from 6% to 10% last year.
You can download the full Luminate Year-End Music Report here.
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
