The global music industry has crossed a symbolic threshold, reaching $31.7 billion in 2025 — up 6.4% on the previous year — according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The milestone is often attributed to streaming, and not without reason. But the forces behind this growth are more uneven than the headline suggests.
At first glance, the narrative appears straightforward: streaming saved music. After years of decline driven by piracy and the collapse of physical sales, the industry has found a new economic foundation in digital distribution. Yet the headline figure conceals a more complex reality — one shaped by how value is created, where it concentrates, and why large parts of the market still struggle to convert consumption into revenue.
The subscription economy behind music’s growth
Streaming now accounts for nearly 70% of global recorded music revenues. More significantly, paid subscription services — through platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music — generate more than half of the industry’s total income. This marks a structural shift from ownership to access, and from one-off transactions to recurring revenue streams.
With 837 million paid subscribers worldwide, the music business has achieved something it lacked for decades: a degree of predictability. Yet this model depends on a crucial condition. It only delivers sustained growth in markets where users are both willing and able to pay for access, creating an uneven geography of revenue that mirrors differences in income, infrastructure and digital habits.
Why growth is uneven across markets
The global growth rate of 6.4% masks this imbalance. In markets with high subscription penetration, revenues continue to expand steadily. Elsewhere, growth is marginal. Public performance rights — generated by radio, venues and other public uses of music — increased by just 0.3% in 2025, highlighting the limited dynamism of non-digital revenue streams.
What emerges is a shift in the industry’s underlying logic: it is no longer driven by consumption alone, but by monetized consumption. Listening, in itself, is no longer enough. The key variable is conversion.
Vinyl is not competing with streaming
Physical formats are also growing again, led by vinyl, which rose by more than 13% in 2025, marking its nineteenth consecutive year of growth. This trend is often interpreted as a nostalgic return to pre-digital consumption, but such a reading misrepresents its economic role.
Vinyl today functions less as a primary listening format than as a product of identity and affiliation. It occupies a space closer to merchandise than to media. Consumers who purchase vinyl are typically the same users who rely on streaming platforms for everyday listening. Rather than competing with digital access, vinyl complements it by adding a layer of ownership, collectability and symbolic value.
The new geography of music power
The most significant transformation in 2025 may be geographic. For the first time, Brazil and Mexico have both entered the global Top 10 music markets, while China has overtaken Germany to become the fourth largest market worldwide, with growth exceeding 20%. Latin America as a whole expanded by 17.1%, making it the fastest-growing region globally.
This shift reflects more than expansion into new territories. It signals a redistribution of influence, driven by the global scalability of digital platforms and the increasing international circulation of local repertoires. The center of gravity of the music industry is no longer concentrated in a small group of Western markets, but is becoming progressively multipolar.
Spain’s music market: Growth without conversio
Spain offers a particularly illustrative case of these dynamics. In 2025, recorded music revenues reached €409.5 million, with strong growth driven by subscription streaming and a notable increase in physical formats. The country now counts 8 million paid streaming accounts, the highest figure on record.
However, structural limitations remain evident. Subscription penetration stands at around 20%, significantly below Northern European markets such as Sweden or the Netherlands, where it exceeds 40%. At the same time, piracy continues to undermine the market: an estimated 34% of internet users in Spain accessed music without paying in 2025, generating losses of approximately €722 million — nearly double the size of the legal market.
Spain, in this sense, is not constrained by demand, but by its capacity to convert that demand into revenue.
The unfinished transition
The global music industry has demonstrated that a subscription-based model can restore growth, stabilize revenues and expand across diverse markets. Yet the transition remains incomplete. Growth is still concentrated in specific regions, certain revenue streams show limited dynamism, and the gap between consumption and monetization persists in key markets.
Crossing the $30 billion threshold is therefore less an endpoint than a milestone. The central challenge facing the industry is no longer whether it can grow, but whether it can distribute that growth more evenly across geographies, users and business models.
The industry has learned how to grow. It has not yet learned how to grow everywhere
Manel González-Piñero is a professor of economics and innovation at the University of Barcelona and ESMUC, focusing on cultural and creative industries.