Music Ally Mid-Year Wraps: This week is Music Ally’s annual Bulletin News summer break, when our writers recharge their batteries. We’re instead publishing a special series of recaps, offering our take on five key trends of the year so far.
Anyone familiar with the U-shaped chart that plots recorded music income between 1999 and 2025 will be aware of the narrative: streaming saved recorded music. And the Big Number is still going up: each passing year reveals more growth. But what happens when that growth starts to slow?
Global recorded-music revenues grew by 4.8% in 2024, a slowdown from 10.2% in 2023. The US market saw only 3.3% growth, with paid subscriptions growing by half the rate of the previous year. And ad-supported music is declining too. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs has lowered its 2025 forecasts for the global recorded-music market and ad-funded streaming, while the IFPI’s figures show the slowdown in growth. It’s still growth! But while a slowdown like this should perhaps not ring alarm bells, perhaps the music industry should be reaching for the big red button.
In recent years, one strategy to grow the streaming income pie has been akin to pushing against an open door: people in most places seem to want DSPs, so expanding into new markets makes new money. The challenge with this approach is clear: after a while, you don’t have any more new markets to feasibly open into; and in the established markets you start to hit a saturation point for streaming subscriptions.
Superfans of… what?
Solutions for re-igniting growth thus need to be found outside of the pie-enlarging approach: perhaps the DSPs can make – to build tortuously on this analogy – some slices of the pie richer. And, DSPs seem to think, in near-saturated mature markets, those super-slices will be funded by superfans.
Superfans are a $4.3bn opportunity according to Goldman Sachs. Spotify is readying its Music Pro tier, while Apple Music and Amazon Music are in talks over their own supremium tiers. Sources say the new Spotify tier will be a $5.99-add on, and that the three main features are higher-quality audio, early access to gig tickets, and the ability to mix or remix tracks.
If this is true, then superfandom – in DSP World – seems to mean “superfans of streaming” as much as it does “superfans of artists”. But is that what the market wants? There are, no doubt, plenty of people who want the extra “DSP superfan” features – but how many? And when some platforms offer HQ audio as part of a standard subscription, is the mooted remixing option a big enough draw? We’ll (perhaps) soon find out.
And then consider the “artist superfan” – is paying another $70 a year a worthwhile exchange for early ticket access? We’ve seen the recent frenzied clamour for certain tickets, so, yes, perhaps. But current marketing wisdom says that what superfans want is community and a sense of connectivity to the artist – who they will happily support with extra cash. No DSP currently has spoken about plans to include these kind of community features.
The tracks of my tiers
UMG apparently insisted earlier this year on a multi-tiered strategy as part of its new deal with Spotify, and the label has suggested a number of community-ish features like listening parties and artist Q&As as part of a superfan tier. And it’s worth noting that “artist superfans” are not merely at the Swiftie level – every artist has superfans, as Deezer’s CEO recently explained – and any extra income per month from a DSP may be welcome.
We’re still awaiting Spotify’s superfan move, but make no mistake – there is pressure on DSPs from music rightsholders to be more aggressive in how they pull in cash. The steadily raising of subscription prices is something labels want to happen more often (with Netflix’s approach often cited as an example). But we then move into apples vs oranges territory – Netflix doesn’t hold all the TV shows and movies ever made, and the content it does provide is consumed very differently to music.
So what does the future hold? There are clear tensions between what the industry wants in the form of more money from fans, and how fans, squeezed for time, cash, and attention, might actually behave. They may resist price rises, or look to existing platforms for superfan perks, or even look to non-DSP sources to access music.
Music consumption behaviour has shifted a lot since the CD-buying days of 1999, and while the needs of fandom has remained roughly the same, the methods of doing it have changed dramatically. Can the DSPs figure out how to fulfill all those modern consumption preferences – and align that with the multi-faceted ways that fans engage with artists in 2025?
