Its name may have changed, but research firm Luminate remains one of the music industry’s key sources of data, and its VP, global Helena Kosinski one of the most engaging explainers of what those numbers show.
She kicked off the second day of the NY:LON Connect conference this week with a presentation on music consumption in a post-pandemic world.
Kosinski started with the company’s recently-published data on music consumption in 2022, which saw a 25.6% global rise in on-demand audio and video streams to 5.3tn (yes, trillion), including the first ever year when US on-demand audio streams passed 1tn.
She also pointed out one of the most curious facts about the last year in streaming. Coldplay’s ‘Hymn for the Weekend’, which was originally released in 2016, was the most popular track globally in 2022 with 9bn audio and video streams.
Luminate has also been poring over its data for some of the individual countries that are emerging in the streaming economy. Indonesia, for example, where 75% of the population streams music.
It’s still more of an ad-supported market (i.e. many of them streaming for free) but Kosinski said Luminate’s most recent survey showed 52% of Indonesian music listeners plan – or at least say they plan, which is always the caveat with market research – to subscribe to a streaming service in the next six months.
She also noted that 74% of Indonesian music listeners engage with music that originates from outside their home country, before comparing all these stats to another fascinating music market: India.
There, 70% of the population streams music and – in a country where there has been a growing debate about the need to drive more people towards subscriptions – 62% of music listeners surveyed by Luminate there said they were planning to subscribe in the next six months. Meanwhile, 45% engage with music originating from outside India.
That makes India stand out: a point Kosinski made by showing data from Colombia, where 81% of the population stream music; 53% are planning to subscribe in the next six months, and 78% are engaging with music from other countries. “India is the outlier,” said Kosinski.
Well, one of the outliers. Luminate has analysed a range of markets to see which ones have the highest number of ‘unique content’ in their charts – i.e. songs that are only a hit in that country. India, Japan, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea are among the countries that score highly on that metric.
Kosinski went on to talk about Luminate’s ‘Global Hit Score’ metric, which measures the global success of songs based not just on their total number of streams, but also by their geographic breadth: their ranking in individual countries, with the size of those streaming markets also factored in.
Coldplay didn’t top this chart in 2022 – ‘Hymn for the Weekend’ was second behind Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow’s ‘Industry Baby’, which scored 65.3 (out of 100) on Luminate’s methodology – which Kosinski explained as “if a song was number one in every single of the 49 countries that we track, it would get a Global Hit Score of 100”.
Finally, she circled back to the question of growth. Each of the 49 markets covered by Luminate saw growth in on-demand streaming in 2022.
“Streaming is growing for row, we’re still double-digit, very healthy growth in audio streaming,” she said. “2022 was slightly slower growth, but we’re still in the 20 per cent range.”
However, she noted that the smallest increase came in Norway, which was one of the first countries to heavily adopt music streaming back in the day. “It’s good to keep that market in mind as we try to figure out what happens next with streaming,” she warned.
The NY:LON Connect global music summit is run by Music Biz and Music Ally. This year’s event is held in association with Orfium and Viberate, and hosted by Reed Smith. The Streaming Economy track is sponsored by Downtown and Luminate. You can find all our coverage of the conference sessions here.
