Taylor Swift had a significant impact on popular culture in 2023.
In December, Pollstar reported that the superstar artist’s record-breaking ‘Eras Tour’ had become the first tour in history to generate gross revenues of over $1 billion.
Earlier this month, Swift’s The Eras Tour concert film was confirmed by AMC Theatres to have become the highest-grossing theatrical release of all time among both concert films and documentaries, generated more than $261.6 million in box office revenue globally.
Swift was also last year’s most-streamed artist globally on Spotify, achieving more than 26.1 billion global streams on the platform.
Meanwhile, over in the world’s largest recorded music market, the United States, Swift’s music was responsible for 1 in every 78 on-demand audio streams in the market last year.
That’s according to fresh data from US market monitor Luminate (formerly MRC Data / Nielsen Music), which published its Year-End report for 2023 last week. (You can download it here.)
Food for thought: If Swift were a record label – which, by owning her own recorded music copyrights (post-Big Machine era), she kind of is – that ‘1 in 78’ stat would equate to her claiming a US market share of audio streams of 1.28% in 2023.
That’s a bigger audio streaming market share than both the entire Jazz (0.8%) and Classical (0.9%) genres, according to Luminate data, as well as the entire ‘Children’s’ genre (1.1%).
According to Luminate’s new report, the US market’s total annual on-demand audio streams grew 12.7% YoY to reach 1.2 trillion in 2023 (see chart below).
That means Taylor Swift’s music was responsible for over 15.3 billion streams in the United States last year.
Luminate also reports that Taylor Swift’s music made up 1.79% of the entire US recorded music market when a formula is applied to combine physical and digital sales plus streams into a single metric. (This metric includes Total Albums w/ TEA w/ SEA On-Demand Audio).
To put the scale of Taylor Swift’s 1.79% US market share into context, according to Luminate’s report, the entire Classical music genre had a 0.9% share of the US market in 2023 (Albums + TEA + SEA On-Demand Audio).
The Jazz genre, meanwhile, had a 1% share, while the Christian/Gospel genre had a 1.7% share (see below).
The Top 10 of Luminate’s 2023 Year End US ‘Top Albums’ chart (Album + TEA + On-Demand SEA) features five of Swift’s albums.
Midnights is at No.2, with 3.209 million TAC units registered across 2023. The album generated 2.859 billion on-demand audio streams, and 973,000 album sales, according to Luminate (see below).
Swift’s 1989 (Taylor‘s Version), came in fourth place, after generating 2.872 million Total Album Consumption units, 1.151 billion on-demand audio streams, and 1.975 million album sales in 2023.
Lover, meanwhile, at sixth place on the chart registered 1.875 million TAC units across 2023. The album generated 1.873 billion on-demand audio streams, and 425,000 album sales.
Speak Now (Taylor‘s Version), and folklore, are in eighth and ninth place respectively on Luminate’s 2023 Year End US ‘Top Albums’ chart, with 1.775 million and 1.612 million Total Album Consumption units, respectively.
Elsewhere in the US, according to Luminate, on-demand song streams (Audio + Video) grew 14.6% in 2023, driven by superstars like Taylor Swift, SZA and Morgan Wallen.
That 14.6% growth translated to 1.5 trillion on-demand (Audio + Video) song streams in the US last year.Music Business Worldwide
