The Big Question: Where is the biggest music market in the world?

2024 was quite the year for women in music: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest grossing tour in history, Beyoncé became the most Grammy nominated artist ever (99) and the top 3 albums of the year globally were from Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Sabrina Carpenter.

But what do the financials of the industry look like and what are the trends shaping the industry right now?

In this episode of The Big Question, Hannah Brown is joined by Victoria Oakley, the CEO of the global body for record labels IFPI, to discuss their latest Global Music Report.

How much is the music industry worth?

The ‘music industry’ isn’t just one single industry – it’s made up of many different parts which in turn influence other industries like travel, hospitality, fashion – as demonstrated by the 2024 ‘Swiftonomics’ phenomenon.

“So touring and live and concerts are huge, right? Then streaming – where you perhaps do an awful lot of your listening, there is publishing, there is songwriting, there is music for film, there’s music for adverts, there is merchandising. There’s this whole ecosystem of different ways in which artists both reach their fans and make money and can thrive as artists,” Victoria explained. 

According to IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, just one sector of it, global recorded music, grew 4.8% in 2024 and was valued at $29.6 billion (€27.1bn).

Though the industry’s growth may have slowed in recent years, it’s still outperforming many others and significantly higher than the average global GDP growth in 2024 – 3.2% according to the OECD. 

Europe represented 29.5% of the global figure and grew at a rate of 8.3%, significantly higher than the US & Canada’s +2.1%. That’s despite the fact that the USA is the world’s largest music market, followed by Japan, the UK and then Germany. 

The main revenue driver? Streaming. 

What is driving growth in the recording industry?

Subscription streaming grew by 9.5% and the number of users across the globe rose 10.6% to 752 million people in 2024. 

In fact, streaming revenues exceeded $20bn for the first time ever in 2024 ($20.4bn / €18.6bn) and represented 69% of total recorded music revenues. 

To put that in perspective, $20bn is more than the entire recorded music industry revenues for each year between 2003 and 2020.

While streaming is the main driver, it’s not the only factor. 

Although CDs are still popular in Japan, overall physical formats decreased 3.1%. However, that’s not the case for vinyl. 

Vinyl revenues continued to grow in 2024, up 4.6%, which was the 18th consecutive year of growth.

“In South Korea it’s absolutely huge and actually in other parts of the world where they’re listening to K-pop, they often buy it first on vinyl,” Victoria said.

“What you also have is a lot of superfans buying vinyl as a collector’s item and they will buy multiple different versions. 

“So you may have an artist who releases essentially the same record, but with different colours of vinyl, different artwork, different material, different words, different poetry on the insert and it’s really important to fans who want to have that really strong personal connectivity with their artist.”

What are the trends shaping the music industry right now?

“15 to 20+ years ago, you had to sing in English to really make it to the top and so music from America, Britain, Canada did incredibly well in most places.” 

“That is just not the case anymore, anywhere in the world,” Victoria stated. 

In fact, every European country predominantly listens to music in their own language and so the challenge now is increasing exports to other markets. 

“Who’d have thought ten years ago that every teenager all over the world would be listening to K-pop? And so if South Korea can do it, there’s no reason that nobody else can’t.” 

“It’s a little bit trickier if your music is in a language that is spoken by very few people around the world but […] it absolutely can be done,” Victoria added. 

The biggest market growths in 2024 were seen in Latin America (+22.5%), Middle East & North Africa (+22.8%) and Sub-Saharan Africa (+22.8%). 

“I think one of the interesting stories in terms of Latin American music is how it’s reaching the broader world, perhaps taking its rightful place on the global stage.” 

“I also think there are a number of countries that are coming into their moment in the music industry in the coming years.” 

“So quite what will happen in China and quite what will happen in India remain uncertain but those are huge markets with huge diversity and variety in both their offer of music and what they listen to. And so I think watching both of those markets over the coming years will be really interesting.” 

The Big Questionis a series from Euronews Business where we sit down with industry leaders and experts to discuss some of the most important topics on today’s agenda.

Watch the video above for the full conversation about the Global Music Report.