Recorded Music Made $29.6 Billion Last Year. Here Is Where the Money Stops.
The IFPI, the trade body for the world's record labels, reported that global recorded-music revenue reached 29.6 billion US dollars in 2024, up 4.8 percent and the tenth consecutive year of growth. Streaming accounted for around 69 percent of the total, and subscription streaming alone passed 20 billion dollars. By the industry's own account it is a healthy business. By the account of most working musicians it is not, and both are describing the same money.
The gap is in the plumbing. A subscription dollar paid to a streaming service is split first between the service and the rights holders, typically around 30 to 70. The rights-holder share is then divided between the recording (the master) and the composition (the song), with the master taking the larger part. The label that owns the master pays the artist a royalty on its share, at a rate set in a contract that may have been signed decades ago, after recouping advances and costs. The songwriter is paid separately through publishers and collecting societies, at rates that in many countries are set by regulation rather than negotiation.
By the time a stream's revenue has passed through those splits, the artist's share of a single play is fractions of a cent. The industry's growth has been real; its distribution has been top-heavy, because streaming's economics reward catalogue, and catalogue is owned disproportionately by the three major labels and the investment funds that have bought older rights.
That is why the loudest fights in the business are about the model, not the total. Some services have moved toward paying artists based on their own listeners' subscriptions rather than a global pool, which favours acts with dedicated audiences. Several have introduced minimum-stream thresholds below which no royalty is paid, which removes millions of tracks from the payout entirely. Artists' organisations have pushed for a fixed per-stream floor; the services have resisted.
The other structural shift is who owns the songs. Investment funds spent billions between 2019 and 2023 buying catalogues from artists and their estates, valuing them on the predictability of streaming income. The result is that a growing share of the industry's revenue flows to financial owners rather than to labels or artists, a change that the headline figure does not show at all.
Live music, which is not in the IFPI number, is where most artists now earn, and where the audience pays the most. Ticket prices for major tours have risen far faster than inflation, and the economics of touring for smaller acts have worsened as costs rose. The recorded-music figure describes one part of a business whose centre of gravity has moved.
Read the 29.6 billion, then, as a statement about ownership. The industry grew. Whether the people who make the music grew with it depends almost entirely on which side of the split they sit.
