Country’s New Era: Shaboozey, Beyonce and Morgan Wallen Sway Genre’s 2024 Growth
Written by djfrosty on January 23, 2025
Country music was shaken, and stirred, and chilled by Shaboozey‘s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” during 2024.
The breezy interpolation of a 20-year-old hip-hop song has spent 30 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs in the third-longest run thus far in history. It’s been certified quintuple-platinum by the RIAA. And now Luminate recognizes it as the most streamed country song of 2024, as well as last year’s top-selling country digital song.
Luminate’s 2024 year-end report, released Jan. 15, showed country expanding in the United States and growing significantly in foreign markets as well. The report also underscored the genre’s growing footprint in nontraditional demographics, with Beyoncè‘s Cowboy Carter ranking as the year’s top-selling country album, and finishing No. 6 among the top 10 country albums when tracked by total-equivalent album (TEA) units.
It marked the first time that either Shaboozey or Beyoncè appeared on a year-end Luminate country list, though their emergence within country did not mean the disappearance of familiar sounds and faces. Morgan Wallen repeated in the top two positions among country albums by TEA units with One Thing at a Time and Dangerous: The Double Album. Zach Bryan landed three titles among the top 10: Zach Bryan (No. 3), American Heartbreak (No. 5) and The Great American Bar Scene (No. 7). And Luke Combs finished at No. 9 and No. 10 with This One’s for You and Gettin’ Old. It marks the seventh straight year that This One’s for You finished among the top 10.
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The shift from the traditional purchasing economy to streaming continued, as country compiled 118 billion on-demand audio streams during 2024. Digital album sales in the genre were a mere 1.7 million units.
Two anomalies make it imprudent to compare year-to-year numbers. Luminate changed its methodology for tracking physical album sales. Plus, the tracking period —from Dec. 29, 2023, through Jan. 2, 2025 — covered 53 weeks, rather than the typical 52 weeks.
Still, 2024 was only the second year that on-demand country streams exceeded 100 billion. (The genre logged 113.1 billion in 2023.) And the 1.7 million album sales are a far cry from a decade ago, when country moved 33.3 million albums. In fact, the top two albums from that year — Eric Church‘s The Outsiders and Luke Bryan‘s Crash My Party — sold 1.6 million albums on their own that year, nearly matching the digital total for the entire genre in 2024.
Notably, country’s streaming footprint has widened during this decade. On-demand country streams in the United States are up a whopping 57% since 2020 and have also grown 7.7% outside of U.S. territories.
Following are the top 10 entries for five country consumption lists compiled by Luminate for 2024:
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