Luminate midyear report: global music streaming grew 10 percent

Luminate published its 2026 midyear report on 15 July 2026, and for the first time put music alongside television and film in a single document. Chief executive Rob Jonas said the two businesses no longer live separately: music companies want a read on streaming television and theatrical performance, and film and television companies are asking for the reverse.

The headline number is growth. Global on-demand audio streams rose 9.8 percent in the first half to 2.8 trillion, a slight acceleration on the 9.6 percent recorded for the whole of 2025. Streams outside the United States grew faster still, up 11.8 percent to 2.0 trillion, while US streams rose 4.8 percent to 732.7 billion.

R&B and hip-hop still set the domestic pace at roughly one in every four US streams, but dance and electronic was the year's largest growth genre, adding half a share point against the first half of 2025. Luminate's own follow-up analysis credited two things: current records from John Summit and Disco Lines, and a nostalgia wave pulling 2015 to 2017 tracks back into rotation. Disco Lines' remix of Tinashe's No Broke Boys took 120.6 million US streams, and Summit logged 295.1 million, up 59 percent year on year.

The language mix moved noticeably. Nearly one in ten US streams, 9.4 percent, was in Spanish, casual monthly listenership of Latin music peaked at 54 percent in the first quarter, and English-language consumption fell to a new low of 87.1 percent. South Korea rose to third in Luminate's export power rankings on the strength of BTS, with Brazil eighth behind Alok and Anitta.

Physical formats went the other way from the usual story. US CD sales surged 16 percent to 16.3 million units, roughly seven times vinyl's 2.4 percent growth, and even stripping out K-pop the CD figure was up 6.7 percent. Mass market retail took nearly 30 percent of physical sales.

On artificial intelligence, Luminate found musicians more comfortable than their audience: 54 percent of US musicians showed positive feelings toward generative AI tools, against 35 percent of non-musicians, and 18 percent of musicians reported using AI to edit or remix existing music compared with 6 percent of non-musicians. The highest-ranking AI-assisted song globally sat at number 282.

Luminate also put 20 percent of US music listeners in the superfan bracket, meaning people who engage with artists in five or more ways, with Gen Z and millennials heavily overrepresented. The company's separate survey on audience attitudes to generative AI followed nine days later, and it has previously proposed a framework for tracking AI-generated music. More on the dance boom sits on our electronic hub, and the AI findings landed the same summer that Tyga confirmed AI helped produce parts of his album.