The music industry surpassed 1 trillion streams at its fastest pace ever in a calendar year
LOS ANGELES –
Is non-English music the future of the music business? Maybe.
The global music industry surpassed 1 trillion streams at its fastest rate ever in a calendar year, according to Luminate’s 2023 Midyear Report. The number was reached in three months, a full month faster than in 2022.
Global streams are also up 30.8 percent from last year, reflecting an increasingly international music market.
In addition, Luminate found that two out of five — or 40 percent — of American music listeners enjoy music in a non-English language. And a whopping 69 percent of American music listeners like music from artists from outside the US
According to the report, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, German and Arabic are the most popular non-English music languages among US music listeners, with Latin genres and K-pop leading the way.
“In particular, our streaming data shows that Hispanic and Korean music are the most popular when looking at the top 10,000 most streamed songs (audio and video combined) in the first half of 2023,” said Jaime Marconette, senior director of Luminate. music insights and industrial relations.
“In addition, the share of Spanish-language music in that top 10,000 has grown by 3.6 percent since 2021, while the share of English-language music has fallen by 4.2 percent in the same time,” he says.
That’s reflected in Luminate’s 2023 Midyear Top Albums chart, where Bad Bunny’s spring 2022 album “Un Verano Sin Ti” still makes the top 10 a year later (the chart plays a combination of album sales, on- demand audio/visual sales, and digital song sales). When “top albums” are defined solely by physical and digital sales, K-pop dominates, taking six of the top 10 positions.
“K-pop fans are, unsurprisingly, some of the most avid fans in physical formats,” says Marconette.
Luminate found that K-pop fans are 69 percent more likely to buy vinyl and 46 percent more likely to buy CDs than the average American music listener over the next 12 months. One in four K-pop fans has bought a cassette in the past 12 months.
