As music streaming gains popularity in emerging markets, the growth of on-demand audio streaming in the U.S. continues to lag the rest of the world.
In the first half of 2025, growth of U.S. on-demand audio streams slowed to 4.6% from 8.0% in the prior-year period, according to Luminate’s mid-year report released Wednesday (July 16). Outside of the U.S., streaming is growing twice as fast as in the U.S., although the pace there also slowed considerably. The rest of the world’s on-demand audio streams were up 12.6% to 1.8 trillion streams, which was down from the prior-year period’s approximately 18.3% gain.
The differences in growth rates help explain why music companies are expanding to emerging markets. Mature markets will continue to grow with the help of higher subscription prices, but companies are attracted to the potential of fast-growing markets such as China, India, Thailand and Brazil. At the beginning of the decade, major labels were investing in tech startups in Western markets; now their M&A strategy focuses on capturing growth elsewhere in the world.
That the U.S. has a slower streaming growth rate than the rest of the world doesn’t come as a surprise. The U.S., as well as Western Europe and Australia, were early adopters of music streaming platforms, and global streaming services didn’t initially target populous countries such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines. As these and other emerging markets play catch-up, the U.S. accounts for a diminishing share of streams worldwide. In the first half of 2025, the U.S. accounted for 28% of on-demand audio streams, down from 29% and 31% in the two previous mid-year periods.
While Luminate doesn’t track albums globally, the mid-year report also showed that U.S. album sales fell 6.0% to 41.0 million. Physical album sales slipped 3.2%, more than a six percentage-point turnaround from the 3.8% gain a year earlier, while digital album sales fell 17.7% to 6.8 million, more than seven percentage points worse than the 10.3% decline, to 8.3 million units, they suffered in the first half of 2024.
Total U.S. album consumption — a combination of streams and sales of tracks and albums — was up 3.9% to 558.9 million album units, which was down from the 7.4% increase in album consumption at the midpoint of 2024.
