The shrinking market share of English language music on streaming services globally has been acutely highlighted by stats published by market monitor Luminate in its recent Year-End report for 2023.
According to Luminate, two years ago, in 2021, the annual share of English-language content among the world’s Top 10,000 streaming tracks (total on-demand streams inclusive of audio + video) was 67%.
A year later, in 2022 the share of English-language content amongst those Top 10,000 global tracks had fallen to 62.1%.
Last year (2023) it shrunk again, to 54.9%.
Looking at the trendlines, you’d have to assume this number is going to fall beneath 50% sooner rather than later.
Flipping these figures around, non-English-language music therefore claimed 45.1% of streams of 2023’s Top 10,000 on-demand streaming tracks globally.
The top 5 languages last year amongst these 10,000 tracks, according to Luminate, were English (54.9%), Spanish (10.1%), Hindi (7.8%), Korean (2.4%) and Japanese (2.1%).
Interestingly, despite Latin Music’s continued success globally, Spanish-language music’s share of the world’s Top 10,000 on-demand streaming tracks declined in 2023 – down from 12.4% in 2021 to 10.1% last year.
But perhaps the biggest story right now in terms of this topic?
That can be found in India.
Is India about to become The world’s biggest streaming market?
Luminate reports that Hindi-language music’s market share of the world’s Top 10,000 streaming tracks (on-demand streams, inclusive of audio + video) more than doubled between 2021 (3.8%) and 2023 (7.8%).
What’s causing such a rapid rise in Hindi’s market share?
You only have to look at the momentous increases in volume of total music streams in India for your answer.
According to Luminate, India saw just over 1 trillion total on-demand music streams (video + audio) in 2023 – 1.037 trillion, to be more precise.
That was the world’s second-biggest annual streaming volume by market, behind the USA (1.454 trillion plays).
It was also nearly three times larger than the No.3 country, Brazil (373.5 billion streams).
However, India saw the biggest YoY increase in total annual on-demand music streams of any nation last year: Its 2023 total stream haul was up by nearly half a trillion plays (+463.7 billion) vs. 2022.
The US, by contrast, saw a YoY increase of just 184.0 billion.
If a similar level of streaming volume occurs in these two nations in 2024, India will run the USA close as the world’s biggest music streaming nation in terms of total on-demand play volume this year.
And if annual streaming volume growth in the US slows in the 12 months ahead, as many expect it will – but India can sustain its 2023 YoY streaming growth margin in 2024?
India could become the world’s largest music streaming territory by volume this year.
Watch this space!
Meanwhile, in the US, Luminate reports that in 2023, the streaming share of English-language content amongst the Top 10,000 streaming tracks in the market (on-demand streams inclusive of both audio and video) decreased by 3.8% since 2021.
Spanish-language content, meanwhile, grew +3.8% in that same timeframe.
(To clarify: Luminate says this stat reflects “streaming share” amongst the Top 10,000 tracks, rather than the share that each language claims of the Top 10,000 tracks.)
In 2023, the streaming share of English-language content amongst the Top 10,000 streaming tracks in the US was 88.8%.
This means, obviously enough, that more than one-in-ten plays of the most popular tracks in the US last year were of music not performed in English.
The streaming share of Spanish-language content in the US last year, meanwhile, stood at 8.1%.
Six Latin Music artists achieved over 1 billion On-Demand Audio streams in the US in 2023, including Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Karol G, Junior H, Fuerza Regida, with each of these artists in the US Top 125 for 2023 Audio streaming.
