Reports: Music streaming

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Cover image for Streaming strongholds

Streaming strongholds
High-potential markets for global music players

Perry Gresham

11 Aug 2025

ARPU Labels Streaming

While the balance of music streamers continues to tip towards global south markets, their smaller ARPU rates limit their revenues. Meanwhile, periodic price-rises and the advent of supremium will reinforce the contributions from the West. This report highlights streaming strongholds, those markets which, underscored by high music engagement and his...

Cover image for Music consumer behaviour Q1 2025

Music consumer behaviour Q1 2025
Mixed signals

Mark Mulligan

17 Jul 2025

Consumer behaviour Streaming France

This report presents MIDiA Research consumer data for music. Data covered includes weekly active users, streaming music behaviour, non-streaming behaviour, fandom activity, and audio consumption. All data is from MIDiA’s Q1 2025 survey, with data for US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Poland, Spain, Colombia, Japan, n = 9,023.

Cover image for International success for local language artists

International success for local language artists
A strategic playbook

Laura Fisher

24 Jun 2025

UK France Spotify

The music industry is undergoing a paradigm shift. Success once required artists to fit the traditional industry model where anglicisation and relocation to traditional hubs like Los Angeles, New York, or London were prerequisites. Streaming platforms have democratised access, enabling artists to achieve international fame while remaining culturall...

Cover image for Breaking saturation

Breaking saturation
Music streaming pricing strategy

Tatiana Cirisano and Perry Gresham

8 Apr 2025

Labels Subscriptions Streaming

Nearly two decades into the streaming era, established subscription markets like the US are approaching saturation. While growth pockets for standard subscriptions remain, the next stage is about raising average revenue per user through both price increases and user segmentation.

Cover image for Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024

Music discovery snapshot Q4 2024
Breaking through the noise

Olivia Jones

20 Mar 2025

Streaming Marketing Artists

Breaking through the noise is more important than ever for artists. As passive listening grows, facilitating active discovery has become a challenge. On top of this, the way consumers discover music is changing (and fragmenting) as streaming plays a weaker role in music discovery, overshadowed by YouTube and social media for younger consumers.

Cover image for Recorded music market shares 2024

Recorded music market shares 2024
Widening gaps

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

13 Mar 2025

Music revenue Streaming Spotify

After a buoyant 2023, recorded music revenue growth slowed again in 2024, the fourth year of alternating growth rates. It was a year of varied fortunes across both formats and labels, but perhaps most crucially of all, a growing divergence between label streaming growth and DSP growth.

Music streaming consumer profile Q4 2024
Stabilisation and fandom slowdown

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

26 Feb 2025

Willingness to pay Music consumers Streaming

Consumer music behaviours are both stabilising and showing signs of coming change. Change that could be challenging for all music business stakeholders, especially with regards to fandom monetisation. This report presents data-focused visuals and impactful analysis of trends and anomalies that will inform your understanding of what is happening to ...

Cover image for Audio’s entertainment value

Audio’s entertainment value
Examining audio listeners’ cross-entertainment lives

Rutger Rosenborg

13 Feb 2025

music industry Music streaming Content

Typically, the marketing team for a games company or TV show would not be thinking of audiobooks and podcast listeners as a key consumer segment to address. Yet, podcast and audiobook listeners are digitally sophisticated and spend more time and money than the consumer average on most forms of entertainment – including games, music, and video.

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Latent potential
Japan music consumer user profile

Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Cirisano

19 Sep 2023

Music streaming Audience Insight

This report presents MIDiA consumer data for key music behaviours of Japan’s consumers. The data covered includes streaming app usage, social app usage, key audio formats (radio, streaming, and podcasts), fandom / identity, and artist content. All data is from our Q1 2023 survey, fielded in US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, Ge...

Cover image for Recorded music market 2022

Recorded music market 2022
Reality bites

Mark Mulligan

17 Mar 2023

TuneCore Music streaming Kobalt

Following a spectacular year of growth in 2021, global recorded music revenue growth slowed significantly in 2022, due to the combined impact of global economic headwinds and growth slowdown in mature streaming markets. Context, though, is everything – not many industries can deliver solid growth while the global economy is in turmoil, ad markets...

Cover image for Music’s Instagram moment

Music’s Instagram moment
The social music creation revolution

Tatiana Cirisano

1 Mar 2023

Consumer behaviour Apple Spotify

Social media has steadily integrated music, and music creation tools have steadily become more social. These trends are converging, accelerated by shifts in consumer behaviour and artificial intelligence (AI). The result could be a new set of music creation and re-creation tools, integrated within social platforms and geared towards casual consumer...

Cover image for Closing the background gap

Closing the background gap
Focused versus background audio listening

Kriss Thakrar, Tatiana Cirisano and Annie Langston

30 Nov 2022

Spotify Radio YouTube

The rise of attention inflation means that consumers are maximising their limited time by multitasking between various formats, spurring a rise in background consumption. This creates a “new” space for platforms to compete for consumers’ time. Among entertainment formats, audio is best placed to conquer background listening, but music streami...

Cover image for A field of all levels

A field of all levels
Strategizing music’s attention economy

Tatiana Cirisano

29 Nov 2022

Consumer behaviour Music creators Record labels

Over roughly the past decade, each stage in the evolution of the attention economy accelerated the pace of fragmentation and oversaturation in music, unearthing new challenges for each micro-generation of artists. With all these generations now competing in the same playing field, artist strategy depends strongly on the era in which they rose to pr...

Cover image for The future of music

The future of music
The rise of a counterculture industry

Mark Mulligan, Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

30 Jun 2022

Consumer behaviour Spotify Music creators

Music streaming and the attention recession have turned music into a background activity. Artists en masse are struggling to cut through the noise, realising that streaming is neither a place to build deeper relationships with fans nor to generate meaningful income.

Cover image for Music catalogue acquisition

Music catalogue acquisition
Picking apart the $5 billion competition for icons

Kriss Thakrar and Tatiana Cirisano

31 Mar 2022

investment Music streaming music catalogue

A variety of economic factors and stock market volatility during the coronavirus pandemic helped establish music as an attractive asset class for institutional investors. With labels, publishers, institutional investors, and newly launched funds now competing for the same diminishing pool of evergreen catalogue, competition and prices are high.

Cover image for Music market subscriber shares 2021

Music market subscriber shares 2021
Growth is not letting up yet

Mark Mulligan

22 Dec 2021

Subscriptions Streaming Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report, with quarterly data (from Q4 2015 to Q1 2021) and annual label trade revenue (from FY 2015 to FY 2020) for more than 20 streaming services across 34 different markets.

Cover image for Karaoke app user deep dive

Karaoke app user deep dive

Mark Mulligan

30 Nov 2021

Streaming Music apps mobile apps

This report presents data concerning karaoke app users. This data is taken from MIDiA’s Q3 2021 consumer survey. The online survey comprised 9,000 respondents across the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Brazil, South Korea. All country level samples were nationally representative with a 1,000 sample in each market.

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Independent Artists
Pathfinding Through a Pandemic

Mark Mulligan and Keith Jopling

30 Sep 2020

Free Report

artist income Independent artists Music streaming

2019 was yet another stand-out year for independent artists, with revenues, streams and market shares all growing strongly. Then, along came COVID-19 and the world turned upside down. However, in lockdown many independent artists found new opportunities and the ability to innovate and create.

Cover image for Music Subscriber Market Shares 4.0

Music Subscriber Market Shares 4.0
Subscriptions Decouple from Revenue

Mark Mulligan

18 Sep 2020

Subscriptions Streaming Music Subscriptions

This report presents key figures from MIDiA’s global music subscriber market shares model. The full dataset is published alongside this report with quarterly data from Q4 2015 to Q1 2020 and annual label trade revenue from full year 2015 to full year 2019 for 27 streaming services across 34 different markets.

Cover image for Recovery Economics

Recovery Economics
Outlook for Music, Games, Video & Sports

Mark Mulligan, Tim Mulligan, Karol Severin and Alistair Taylor

19 Jun 2020

Video Recorded music Music streaming

MIDiA analysts present in this webinar report how the entertainment industries can plan not to simply bounce back, but to rebuild their value propositions and supply chains to adjust to the realities of the new normal and flourish in the post-lockdown era.

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