Found yourself lost in music more than ever in 2023? Millions were right there with you.
The global music industry surpassed 4 trillion streams in 2023, a new single-year record, Luminate's 2023 Year-End Report found.
Global streams were also up 34% from last year, reflecting an increasingly international music marketplace.
Stateside, three genres saw the biggest growth in 2023: country (23.7%), Latin (which encompasses all Latin musical genres, up 24.1%), and the world (a catchall that includes J-pop, K-pop and Afrobeats, up 26.2%.)
It seems that more Americans are listening to non-English music. By the end of 2023, Luminate found that Spanish-language music's share of the top 10,000 songs streamed in the U.S. grew by 3.8%, and English-language music's share dropped by 3.8%.
Under the Latin umbrella, regional Mexican music saw massive growth. The genre term – which encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other styles – grew 60% in U.S. on-demand audio streams, accounting for 21.9 billion. Four of the six Latin artists to break 1 billion audio streams in the U.S. were Mexican acts: Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H and Fuerza Regida, who also placed in the top 125 artists streamed.
Armado and Peso Pluma's "Ella Baila Sola" surpassed a billion streams on Spotify in less than a year and became the first regional Mexican Top 10 hit on Billboard's all-genre Hot 100, peaking at No. 4 – later, Bad Bunny's collaboration with Grupo Frontera, "Un x100to," hit No. 5.
As for the Taylor Swift of it all: Time's 2023 Person of the Year made up 1.79% of the U.S. market, Luminate found, accounting for 1 in every 78 U.S. on-demand audio streams.
Her dominance is reflected in Luminate's 2023 top albums chart, where Swift accounts for five of the top 10 albums in the U.S.
However, hip-hop continues to rule when it comes to overall music consumption in the U.S. – even with the success of Swift and the massive achievements of country music and non-English language programming – accounting for 25.5% of all streams.
Maybe it had something to do with hip-hop celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2023 because streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts dropped 7.1% from 2022, while catalog streams – older material – grew 11.3%.