Taylor Swift Made Up 1.7% of Total U.S. Music Market in 2023, According to Luminate’s Year-End Report

Jem Aswad
·6 min read
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Taylor Swift made up 1.7% of the entire U.S. recorded-music market in 2023, according to the year-end report from Luminate, the industry data partner formerly known as SoundScan.

The news does not come as a surprise after a year in which Swift staged a world-beating global tour and was seemingly ubiquitous in nearly every form of media — the report estimates one in 78 on-demand audio streams in the U.S. was a Swift song (note: that total does not include video).

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Other results from the study note that overall music streaming was up nearly 34%, hip-hop remains the most-consumed genre of music in the U.S., and Afrobeats and K-pop were the fastest-growing genres in streaming.

Speaking on the release of the report, Luminate CEO Rob Jonas said, “As the trend of global streaming expands, evidenced by a +34% surge in 2023 according to our data, Luminate is committed to enhancing the international scope of the data and insights we provide. We’re pleased to present this report, fueled predominantly by our new country-level streaming data and amplified by insights from our audience research. We aim to capture the trends that defined the music industry over the past year across 50 diverse markets. It also reflects the innovative strategies our team applied in managing data in 2023, including new partnerships with companies such as Deezer, Melon, Flo and Anghami. We look forward to continuing that collaborative approach in 2024.”

Bullet points from the report appear below:

Overall 2023 Metrics:

•    Global Total On-Demand (audio + video) streaming grew +33.7% in 2023

•    Global On-Demand Audio streaming grew +22.3% in 2023

•    U.S. On-Demand Audio streaming grew +12.7% in 2023

◦     US audio streaming sees volume growth acceleration for second straight year

•    Total Catalog music consumption (Album + TEA + On-Demand SEA) continued to grow, with a 0.4% increase in its total Catalog vs. Current Music share in the U.S.

◦     This is much smaller than the 2.38% in share points Catalog grew in 2022

•    Taylor Swift made up 1.79% of the US market (Total Albums w/ TEA w/ SEA On-Demand Audio) and 1 in every 78 US On-Demand Audio streams

Trend 1: Making Moves – Genre Trends in 2023

•    The following three genres saw the biggest growth in the U.S. in On-Demand Audio streaming activity by percentage change: World, which includes K-Pop and Afrobeats (+26.2%); Latin (24.1%); Country (+23.7%)

•    Understanding the Gen Z Country listener:

◦     Gen Z Country Listeners in the U.S. are 48% more likely to discover new music through video and/or audio streaming services than the average U.S. music listener and +16% more than Gen Z music listeners

◦     Gen Z Country Listeners in the U.S. are 64% more likely to listen to playlists shared by family and friends than the average U.S. music listeners and +16 % more likely than Gen Z music listeners.

•    Regional Mexican Music grew +60% in U.S. On-Demand Audio streams

◦     U.S. Regional Mexican listenership sees higher concentrations along the west coast and through the Southwest in states like Texas. This listenership aligns with Census  demographic trends illustrating hispanic population patterns to the US. With 47% of Latin fans discovering new music via Friends and Relatives the tie to culture is evident.

•    U.S. Hip-Hop consumption in 2023:

◦     In a year when Hip-Hop celebrated its 50th anniversary, the genre continues to lead all others in U.S. consumption (Albums w/ TEA w/ SEA On-Demand Audio)

◦     However, Current vs Catalog U.S. On-Demand Audio streaming reveals that R&B/Hip-Hop Current streaming is down 7.1% in volume since 2022 while Catalog grew 11.3%.

Trend 2: Languages, Listeners and Locations

•    Six Latin Music artists achieved 1B+ On-Demand Audio streams in the US (Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Karol G, Junior H, Fuerza Regida) with each of these artists in the US Top 125 for 2023 Audio streaming

•    Streaming share of English-language content amongst the Top 10K streaming tracks in the U.S. (On-Demand streams inclusive of both audio and video) decreased by 3.8% since 2021, while Spanish-language content grew +3.8% in that same timeframe.

•    The share of English-language content in the Top 10K Global Tracks (Total On-Demand Streams inclusive of audio + video) also continued to decline, while Hindi-language content grew alongside India’s streaming market.

•    63% of Gen Z and 65% of Millennials agree they “listen to new music to experience new cultures & perspectives.”

•    Multilingual music listeners are more likely to discover music via movie soundtracks (+34%), exclusive TV shows from streaming platforms (+36%), and video games (+50%)

•    Multilingual music listeners are 42% more likely than the average music listener to say “having access to music by global artists” is important when choosing a streaming service.

Trend 3: It Was All a Stream

•    Female artist representation in audio stream volume within the Top 500 most-streamed artists in the U.S. grew +4.2 percentage share points between 2022 and 2023.

•    There was an average of 103.5K new ISRCs delivered to DSPs each day in 2023, which is up +10.8% from 2022 when there was an average of 93.4K delivered each day.

•    436k tracks (ISRCs) were streamed 1m or more times Globally in 2023, up from 373.5k tracks in 2022

•    The U.S. average music streaming spend increased in 2023, but Gen Z listeners reported spending 11% less on music streaming services per month when compared to 2022.

•    Tracks released in the last 5 years (2019-2023) make up 48.3% of US audio streaming when analyzing the Top 500k tracks

Trend 4: Business Beyond the Stream

•    US D2C sales up 38.6% in 2023 to 11.8m Total; vinyl D2C sales are up 39.8% year-over-year and CDs up 12.9%. Additionally, over 60% of all US D2C Sales were current titles

•    18% of U.S. music listeners are Super Fans.

•    Super Fans spend +76% more on music per month than the average U.S. music listener.

•    Super Fans spend +126% more on artist merch than the average music listener.

•    The average K-Pop fan is 50% more likely to purchase merch for a music event they did not attend and reported $30.20 as the optimum price for T-shirt merch.

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