Music streams hit 4 trillion in 2023

The global music industry surpassed 4 trillion streams in 2023, a new single-year record, Luminate's 2023 Year-End Report found.

Global streams were also up 34 percent from last year, reflective of an increasingly international music marketplace.

Stateside, three genres saw the biggest growth in 2023: Country (23.7 percent), Latin (which encompasses all Latin musical genres, up 24.1 percent) and world (a catchall that includes J-pop, K-pop and Afrobeats, up 26.2 percent.)

It seems that more Americans are listening to non-English music. By the end of 2023, Luminate found that Spanish-language music's share of the top 10,000 songs streamed in the U.S. grew 3.8 percent, and English-language music's share dropped 3.8 percent.

Under the Latin umbrella, regional Mexican music saw massive growth. The genre term, which encompasses mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, sierreño and other styles, grew 60 percent in U.S. on-demand audio streams, accounting for 21.9 billion. Four of the six Latin artists to break 1 billion audio streams in the U.S. were Mexican acts: Peso Pluma, Eslabon Armado, Junior H, and Fuerza Regida, who also placed in the top 125 artists streamed.

Armado and Peso Pluma's "Ella Baila Sola" surpassed a billion streams on Spotify in less than a year and became the first regional Mexican Top 10 hit on Billboard's all-genre Hot 100, peaking at No. 4 - later, Bad Bunny's collaboration with Grupo Frontera, "Un x100to," hit No. 5.

As for the Taylor Swift of it all: Time's 2023 Person of the Year made up 1.79 percent of the U.S. market, Luminate found, accounting for 1 in every 78 U.S. on-demand audio streams.

Her dominance is reflected in Luminate's 2023 top albums chart, where Swift accounts for five of the top...