Music Trends | Streaming on the Rise; Latin Music Is Popular

Halfway through the year, a few musical trends have become apparent: streaming is up, Latin music has become the fastest-growing genre in the U.S., and physical album variants (multiple releases of the same album) are on the rise.

The global music industry has surpassed 1 trillion streams at the fastest pace ever recorded in a calendar year, according to Luminate’s 2024 Mid-Year Report. This figure was reached ten days faster than in 2023.

Global music streaming also increased by 15.1% with 2.29 trillion on-demand audio streams, compared to 1.99 trillion in the same period last year.

People everywhere are streaming more music, and in the U.S., Latin music has become the fastest-growing genre, up 15.1% from the same period last year.

Latin music streaming also includes more recent material: 35% of all Latin music streaming in the U.S. comes from albums released in the last 18 months. By comparison, for rock music, 70.5% of U.S. streaming comes from deep catalogs, meaning releases that are five years old or more.

To date, no Latin artists have made it into the top 10 albums or songs of the year, but Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma, Fuera Regida, Karol G, Rauw Alejandro, Aventura and Carín León are among the top 200 of the most streamed artists in the United States for the first half of 2024.

Rise of Mexican Music

Last year, Latin music was among the top three fastest-growing genres in the U.S., said Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s vice president of music research and industry relations. The 2024 numbers show that trend will continue.

“Much of this growth is due to the continued rise of regional Mexican music, which is the largest subgenre of Latin music so far this year with more than 13 billion on-demand audio streams in the United States,” Marconette said in an interview with The Associated Press.

And while Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny remains “the most streamed Latin music artist in the U.S.,” he notes that the other three Latin artists who surpassed 100 million on-demand streams in the U.S. in the first half of 2024 are Regional Mexican artists: Pluma, Fuerza Regida and Junior H.

Physical albums remain popular

But it’s not just streaming music that’s popular.

Physical album variants – multiple releases of the same album, sometimes containing different bonus tracks or featuring a different design – have steadily gained popularity since 2020.

In 2024, physical album sales increased 3.8% in the United States compared to the same period last year, from 23.8 million to 24.7 million, the data and analytics firm said in its report.

But it’s not just any artist who has physical variants of their albums. The artists who ranked among the top ten best-selling albums so far this year also had the highest average number of variants. This includes Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Beyoncé, as well as K-pop groups like Tomorrow x Together, Ateez, and TWICE.

In 2024, the average number of variants for an album of the top 10 sales total is 22: seven different vinyl releases, 13 CDs and two cassettes.

“We have observed a consistent trend in recent years where chart-topping albums have increasingly used physical variants in their album release campaigns,” Marconette said.

However, “there has also been criticism within the artist and fan communities about the environmental impacts of producing so many physical products,” he says, suggesting that there is “a clear demand for recycled materials and other sustainability initiatives in this area.”