If investors and music companies want high rates of streaming growth, they should look beyond the suddenly sluggish US market.
Of the few countries that have released mid-year recorded music industry figures, the US has the slowest growth rate for streaming — by far. Japan, Brazil, Italy, Germany and Spain easily outpaced the 3.8% growth rate the US mustered in the first half of 2024, although they are much smaller markets.
In Brazil, the ninth-largest market in 2023, streaming revenue improved 21.1% to BRL 1.442 billion ($284 million) in the first half of 2024, according to the country's trade group, Pro-Música Brasil. Subscription revenue rose 28.4% to BRL 995 million ($196 million), while ad-supported streaming rose just 6.6% to BRL 436 million ($86 million).
Streaming accounts for 99% of total revenue in Brazil, a market that was an early adopter of streaming platforms. (Pro-Música Brasil did not include sync and performance rights in its mid-year numbers. In 2023, these two segments accounted for 12% of total Brazilian revenue.) Former online radio service Rdio — acquired by Pandora in 2015 — launched in Brazil in 2011. Muve Music, acquired by Deezer in 2015, began a partnership with leading mobile operator TIM in 2013. Deezer continues to power TIM's music streaming platform and extended that partnership in January .
Major markets in Asia and Europe also saw impressive streaming gains in the first half of the year. Spain was almost on par with Brazil with a 19.1% stream increase and a 16.6% improvement in total revenue. In Italy, recorded music revenue jumped 15.1% and streaming revenue, which accounts for 80% of the total market, rose 18.1%. (Currency figures were not provided by Italy's trade group FIMI.) The world's second and fourth largest markets, Japan and Germany, had streaming gains of 12.7% and 9.0%, respectively.
Overall, the five ex-US markets grew by 12.2% compared to the first half of 2023, with smaller markets having the highest flow growth rates. Brazil's market is less than 3% the size of the US, while Spain and Italy are 3% and 4% the size of the world's largest market, respectively. Germany's market is 15% as large as Japan's, the US is only a quarter of its size.
What the US lacks in dynamism it makes up for in size. Based on total market revenue for 2023, the U.S. was more than twice the size of the five former U.S. markets combined — $11.04 billion to $5.47 billion, according to IFPI data. In fact, the US is so big that the 3.8% streaming gain was worth $404 million — more than the entire Spanish recorded music market ($355 million) and almost as big as Italy's ($477 million). To reiterate, this is not just flow — we're talking about the total market revenue of these countries.
The rate of streaming growth underpins much of the money flowing into the music business. Investors and companies are betting that the global market can generate near-double-digit growth by the end of the decade. Goldman Sachs' latest “Music in the Air” report, a standard benchmark for measuring music's investment potential, predicts that global streaming revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10% through 2030. This would raise Last year's $19.3 billion market flow to $37.8 billion by the end of the decade.
But the huge US market, which accounted for 42% of global streaming revenue in 2023, according to IFPI, means that other markets will have to continue these rapid paces for the global market to maintain this 10% streaming growth rate . The 12.2% growth rate of the five former US markets is almost halved to 6.4% when their combined value of $5.47 billion is combined with the US market, which is worth $11.04 billion.
Emerging markets certainly have the potential to contribute to global growth, but many of the most populous countries – India, Indonesia, the Philippines – are relatively small and rely more on advertising than high-value subscriptions. For the math to work, the global market needs a strong US
