Streaming, live performance, and direct-to-fan sales are on the rise: How to make money from music in 2025

Streaming is up, live performance is up, hip-hop remains king and the major labels are running scared. That’s according to Luminate’s 2024 year-end music report, the multi-page, multi-faceted industry report that pulls in charts and stats from Billboard and gives music makers a glimpse of everything that they should have been doing more of, what’s hot for 2025, and perhaps why 2024 didn’t go quite as expected.

Luminate’s databases house information compiled from over 500 verified sources, managing more than 20 trillion data points. And with Billboard on board for the charts you have to sit up and take notice.

So what are the hot takes?

First up, the obvious bits. It doesn’t take a bunch of experts to tell you that music streaming continued to grow through 2024, but there is some mild interest in the fact that the States no longer leads the pack in terms of growth, being up 6.4% while the rest of the world - doubtless playing catch up - surged 17.3%.

Countries showing the biggest increases in streaming appetite were (in order) Turkey, Croatia, Romania, Malaysia and South Korea. In fact, 2024 saw a global total of 4.8 trillion streams reaching music fans, up from the 4.2 trillion in 2023.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that the number of songs being uploaded to streaming platforms reached an all-time high in 2024 at an incredible 99,000 per day…

So if you’re wondering why your music isn’t getting discovered (and why Spotify hasn't sent you that cheque yet) then perhaps now you’re a little wiser.

So with your new geo-location targets acquired, what music should you be firing at them? What was 2024’s most popular genre and what can musicians hop on to ride the next popularity wave? Well, Luminate’s mid-year report put Latin music on top as the fastest growing musical genre, but activity in the second half of 2024 has seen pop stepping ahead to become the fastest-growing genre over the full year.

Pop finished the year with being up +0.48 points to rock's +0.40 increase, with artists such as Taylor Swift (12.8 billion streams) Billie Eilish (4.46 billion streams) and Sabrina Carpenter (3.71 billion streams) spearheading its rise.

You can read more about pop’s biggest movers and shakers throughout 2024 in our guide to the Year In Pop

But which genre was the number one purely in terms of streams? That has to be hip-hop (again), with more than one in every four US streams being from that genre. That said, it’s feeling the squeeze, with its overall share down 2.3 points since it won the same accolade back in 2023.

My magpie eyes are hungry for the prize

And there’s an interesting shift in how artists are now monetising their audience (should they be lucky enough to locate one). Luminate’s report found that direct-to-consumer music sales - that is, bands sidestepping conventional retail and streaming services to sell product to their fans directly - continued to increase through the year.

In fact, D2C sales made up 63% of first-week physical album sales in 2024 among the US Top 200 albums of the year, and 31.9% of first week album activity (sales and streaming) among those.

Following that trend it appears that the industry giants have now truly been toppled, with 91.8% of music being deemed as ‘Independently Distributed’ (what would have borne the old-fashioned ‘indie’ label) with just 8.2% coming from ‘Major Distribution’.

But while the artists and big execs must be scratching their heads right about now, when it comes to good old-fashioned songwriting it’s good to see that it’s still possible to get to the top of your game. The world’s biggest songwriters (judged by the number of songs by a songwriter in the worldwide top 1K songs) runs for 2024 - in order – as: Taylor Swift, Max Martin, The Weeknd, Daniel Nigro, Benny Blanco, Olivia Rodrigo, Dr Luke and Shellback.

No surprise that the US produced the biggest count of songwriters able to make the top 1K global on-demand songs, with the UK coming in a respectable second.

And it’ll also come as no surprise to learn that the year only ever showed an increasing role for live music in an artist’s earning potential.

US Gen Z music listeners are the crowd to go for here, spending more than any other generation on gigs and music festivals. 2024 was, in fact, the first time that Gen Z topped other generations in overall live event spend, though millennials still spent the most specifically on gigs (not including festivals).

​The Luminate report offers a fascinating level of insight and anyone willing to move with the times and go where the money is should consider giving it a thoughtful peruse.

Looks like 2025 might be time to get your haircut and ditch that leather jacket…

You can get your copy of the full report on the Luminate Data website.