Music-biz number-cruncher Luminate has published its year-end report for 2025, with plenty of stats for the industry to chew over. We’ll start with the biggest: 2025 saw 5.1 trillion on-demand audio streams of music globally.
That’s up 9.6% year-on-year, with those streams split between 253m individual tracks – or ISRC (International Standard Recording Codes). But as ever, there’s a long, very-lonely tail of music that isn’t being listened to much within that total.
According to Luminate, 120.5m tracks had 10 streams or less last year, with another 62.6m garnering 11-100, and 40.7m played between 101 and 1,000 times. In other words, 88% of the available tracks were streamed fewer than 1,000 times in 2025.
(Luminate’s pyramid graph shows that 120.5m tracks got 0-10 streams, but a bar graph on the following page shows that 65.2m got 1-10 streams. So, it seems 55.3m tracks got zero streams. Ouch.)
At the other end of the scale, 29 tracks got more than 1bn streams in 2025. Luminate noted that tracks with between 1m and 50m streams accounted for 49.4% of all streaming – representing “the backbone of global music consumption”.
But back to 2025’s growth in the number of tracks available. In its 2024 report, Luminate tracked 202m ISRCs, compared to 253m in its new report. On average, 106,000 new ISRCs were delivered to streaming services every day in 2025, up from 99,000 in 2024.
As usual there are plenty of other angles covered in the report: core genre trends in North America; analysis of which countries are growing fastest for premium streams; the surge in music documentaries; superfan stats; and some good stuff on AI artists and listeners’ attitudes towards them.
Meanwhile, your pub fact for 2026 might be this. While Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ hit ‘Die With A Smile’ was the biggest track of 2025 by on-demand audio streams – with 2.86bn – the biggest by on-demand video streams was… *drum roll*
‘Wheels On The Bus’ from kids’ YouTube channel Cocomelon, whose 2.02bn views in 2025 were 600m more than the second-placed song in Luminate’s chart, ‘APT.’ by Bruno Mars and Rosé. Not bad for an animated nursery rhyme originally published in 2018, eh?
