Streaming
Brace yourself, ultra-patriotic protectionists: English-language music from countries such as the U.S. is losing market share around the world — and even in its home markets.
Despite the U.S. owning the world’s most powerful culture machine, people in other countries want to listen to music performed in their native languages. According to Luminate’s 2024 year-end report, music from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries accounted for a lower share of global premium streams in 2024 than the prior year. The United Kingdom had the biggest drop in market share, falling 0.47 percentage points to 8.59%, while the U.S. dropped 0.44 points to 44.29% and Canada fell 0.39% to 3.34%.
In the Philippines, where English is spoken by roughly half of adults, music from the U.K. and U.S. were the biggest losers of market share while local Filipino music gained an astounding 3.32 points. In Japan, where local music has always outperformed English-language music, local music gained 1.35 points while the U.K., U.S. and Canada all lost market share. In Brazil, home to a thriving local music scene, homegrown music gained 0.78 points while the U.K. and Canada both lost market share.
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The shift away from English-language music isn’t happening only in countries where English is not the primary language. In the U.S., homegrown music lost 0.2 percentage points of market share. The same dynamic is seen in the U.K., where homegrown music lost 2.7 percentage points. In English-speaking Australia, music from Australia, the U.S. and Canada all lost market share.
So where did English-language music’s market share go? Mexico was the country of origin with the biggest market share increase in 2024, rising 0.88 percentage points to 4.69% of global premium streams. Brazil owned the second-largest increase, rising 0.33 points to 4.47%. India, which has a distinct local music market and a large diaspora, was third, increasing 0.21 points to 1.42%.
Often, a historical connection between countries could help explain the increasing popularity of one country’s music. In the U.S., music from neighboring Mexico, a major cultural influence for regions far beyond the border states, was the top gainer with an increased market share of 0.56 percentage points. In the U.K. and Australia, both members of the Commonwealth, music from another Commonwealth nation, India, gained 0.13 points and 0.16 points, respectively. Importantly, people of Indian ethnicity account for 2.9% of the U.K.’s population and 3.1 % of Australia’s population.
Local music is also thriving in France, a country not singled out in Luminate’s report. Azzedine Fall, Deezer’s direct of music & culture, says more musical genres performed in French are hitting the charts in the country. “[French-language] rap music is still dominating everywhere in the charts, but we have room for artists doing this kind of Ed Sheeran kind of stuff,” he says. “There is Pierre Garnier, for instance. He’s like the French version [of Ed Sheeran], and it’s kind of a new trend, like the return of pop rock music.” French-language rap has been popular for decades, adds Fall, but pop rock music performed in French is a newer phenomenon: “You would never hear someone doing rock in French 30 years ago.”
The rise of local music in the streaming era is a relatively new phenomenon that was described in a 2023 paper by Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva titled ‘Glocalisation’ of Music Streaming Within and Across Europe. Glocalization—a portmanteau of “global” and “localization”—explains how local music became more successful in a globalized, digital economy. In streaming’s early days, English-language music often dominated charts at the expense of local artists. In 2012, local artists accounted for less than a fifth of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, the Netherlands and Germany, according to the paper. But a decade later, local artists owned 70% of the top 10 in Poland, Italy and Sweden and 60% in France (but just 30% in the Netherlands and 20% in Germany).
The trend toward successful local music is likely to continue, says Romain Vivien, global head of music & president, Europe at Believe. The tools available to music producers “allow for more creation, faster and wider distribution to reach audiences more directly and accurately, and for a wider and more diverse artist community,” he says. It’s a perfect recipe for local labels and producers who create music in many different genres, says Vivien, “while bigger and more global structures sign fewer artists, across fewer genres and invest a lot to try to make them global stars.”
That’s not to say music from the U.S. has fallen out of favor. Artists from the U.S. still had the largest global market share of premium streams in 2024 at 44.29%, and the U.S. ranked No. 1 on Luminate’s Export Power Score, a measure of a country’s ability to export music globally. In fact, the U.K. and Canada rank No. 2 and No. 3 on Export Power Score, topping No. 4 South Korea and No. 5 Germany. The U.S. also gained market share in some places, too, albeit in primarily English-speaking countries: U.S. music rose 2.4 percentage points in the U.K. and 1.7 percentage points in Australia. English-speaking Ireland also gained share in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, likely because of Hozier’s global hit “Too Sweet” (which was the No. 8 song globally in 2024 with 1.71 billion on-demand audio streams, according to Luminate).
As in years past, English-language music also dominated the Luminate report’s lists of top albums and songs. The lone non-English language song to appear in a top 10 list was “Gata Only” by Chilean artist FloyyMenor. The track was a worldwide hit and had great success in the U.S., too, reaching No. 27 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 and topping Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart for 14 weeks in 2024 en route to ranking No. 1 on the year-end Hot Latin Songs list.
Still, the slight decline in English-language music marks a sharp contrast with present-day “America first” jingoism. Changes in music technology mean U.S. music won’t crowd out local music in other countries, and a catchy song can become popular anywhere in the world. Politicians can build a border wall, but they can’t stop music from coming in.
Deezer, a leading French streaming service, says that roughly 10,000 fully AI-generated tracks are being delivered to the platform every day, equating to about 10% of its daily music delivery.
This finding emerged from an AI detection tool Deezer developed and filed two patent applications for in December, the company says. Now, the service is developing a tagging system for the fully AI-generated works it detects in order to remove them from its algorithmic and editorial recommendations and boost human-made music.
According to a press release, Deezer’s new tool can detect AI-made music from several popular AI music models, including Suno and Udio, with plans to further expand its capabilities. The company notes that the tool could eventually be trained to detect from “practically any other similar [AI model]” as long as Deezer can gain access to samples from those models — though the company also says it has “made significant progress in creating a system with increased generalizability, to detect AI generated content without a specific dataset to train on.” It has additional plans to develop the capability to identify deepfaked voices.
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Deezer is the first music streaming platform to announce the launch of an AI detection tool and the first to seek a concrete solution for the growing pool of AI music accumulating on streaming platforms worldwide. Given that AI-generated music can be made much more quickly than human-created works, critics have expressed concern that these AI tracks will increasingly take away money and editorial opportunities from human artists on streaming services.
Among those critics are the three major music companies — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — which collectively sued top AI music models Suno and Udio for copyright infringement last summer. In their complaint, the three companies said Suno and Udio could generate music that would “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
“As artificial intelligence continues to increasingly disrupt the music ecosystem, with a growing amount of AI content flooding streaming platforms like Deezer, we are proud to have developed a cutting-edge tool that will increase transparency for creators and fans alike,” says Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. “Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters. Going forward we aim to develop a tagging system for fully AI generated content, and exclude it from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.“
“We set out to create the best AI detection tool on the market, and we have made incredible progress in just one year,” says Aurelien Herault, Deezer’s chief innovation officer. “Tools that are on the market today can be highly effective as long as they are trained on data sets from a specific generative AI model, but the detection rate drastically decreases as soon as the tool is subjected to a new model or new data. We have addressed this challenge and created a tool that is significantly more robust and applicable to multiple models.”
Some of the biggest streaming services in music are banding together to fight against a major piece of Canadian arts legislation – in court and in the court of public opinion.
Spotify, Apple, Amazon and others are taking action against the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)’s 2024 decision that major foreign-owned streamers with Canadian revenues over $25 million will have to pay 5% of those revenues into Canadian content funds – what the streamers have termed a “Streaming Tax.”
Those funds will go towards established organizations like the non-profits FACTOR Canada and Musicaction, which financially support thousands of musicians and music companies across the country, and which have seen their own resources dramatically drop due to reduced contributions from private broadcasters. It will also go to funds supporting radio and local news.
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The CRTC decision was one of the biggest Canadian music stories of last year, and legal challenges from those services, as well as the Motion Picture Association – Canada (which includes Netflix, Disney, Prime Video and the major U.S. producers and distributors of movies and TV), have pushed it into 2025. The courts have paused the payments until the appeal is heard by the Federal Court of Appeal in June of this year.
That pause has already put at least one fund under immediate duress. The Indigenous Music Office had been directed by the CRTC to launch an Indigenous Music Fund with resources from the streamers’ base contributions, but the delay impedes the IMO’s ability to start the new fund.
The conflict over the regulation is turning into a major struggle, one that illustrates the massive changes and challenges that Canadian music is facing in an increasingly digital landscape. It’s a modern wrinkle to a debate that has spanned decades in Canadian music and media.
“At the base of it, the streamers are questioning the validity of CanCon policies,” says Leela Gilday, musician and board chair of the Indigenous Music Office.
The battle isn’t only happening in court, but in online petitions, political speeches and in Instagram posts from one of Canada’s most successful musicians.
“The Canadian government’s new music streaming tax is going to cost you more to listen to the music you love,” says Bryan Adams in a video shared on Instagram.
The “Summer of ‘69” singer, also a noted critic of Canadian Content regulations, has joined a lobby group called DIMA (the Digital Media Association) in publicly arguing against the regulation. DIMA, which represents Amazon, Apple, Spotify and YouTube, launched a campaign last fall titled “Scrap the Streaming Tax.” The campaign warns consumers that the mandated payments “could lead to higher prices for Canadians and fewer content choices” as a result of increased subscription fees.
But many within the industry have welcomed the regulation, including the membership at CIMA, the Canadian Independent Music Association.
“The question for tech companies who are making money in Canada is: is it appropriate for them to contribute to the Canadian music ecosystem?” asks Andrew Cash, president of CIMA.
Head here for much more on this story.
—Rosie Long Decter
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Canadian Music Industry Leaders Lay Out the Issues That Will Define 2025
As the music industry ramps up in the post-holiday break, the agenda is being set. A number of issues have revealed themselves as the big conversations of 2025: AI, arts funding, government policies amidst uncertainty in Ottawa, support of independent promoters and venues, mental health, the divestment of DEI budgets, and many more.
Billboard Canada gathered 10 music industry authorities from music grant FACTOR, the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA), Music Publishers Canada and many more to talk about the biggest challenges and opportunities facing Canadian music this year.
Here are just a few highlights:
“For the Canadian-owned sector, the ability to compete in a functioning market is paramount,” says Andrew Cash, president and CEO of CIMA. “However, market concentration among the large foreign-owned multi-nationals labels and tech platforms is now at over-reach. That is why CIMA lodged an official complaint with Canada’s competition bureau after TikTok walked away from its negotiations with Merlin. And it is why independent trade associations in Europe and Australia are raising serious concerns after Universal’s recent purchase of Downtown Music.”
“One of the biggest challenges facing the industry this year will be the divestment of DEI budgets, which have been a big part of the reason we have seen such great diverse talent enter the industry over the last five years,” says Keziah Myers, executive director of ADVANCE – Canada’s Black Music Business Collective. “Managing the shift away from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and reminding the industry that Equity-focused processes should be where their efforts are will be a challenge.”
“The fundamental principles of copyright continue to be challenged by artificial intelligence and the platforms that exploit it,” says Jennifer Brown, CEO of SOCAN. “Canadian music creators stand to lose more than 20% of their annual revenue to generative AI platforms by 2028 if safeguards aren’t put in place to protect their copyrights.”
Read the whole roundtable conversation here.
—Kerry Doole and Richard Trapunski
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Big Wreck Named Record Store Day Canada Ambassadors for 2025
Big Wreck have been named 2025 Record Store Day Canada ambassadors. The Canadian rock band will also be releasing their 2012 album Albatross on vinyl for the first time in deluxe 2xLP limited-edition featuring live and unreleased music as a Record Store Day exclusive. The album was certified Gold and was their biggest hit since In Loving Memory Of… in 1997 and its big shiny rock radio staple “That Song.” The title track of Albatross has also gone Platinum.
“It’s a great honour for Big Wreck to be Record Store Day Ambassadors,” says Big Wreck leader Ian Thornley. “We grew up going to record stores and building our vinyl collections and it means a lot to us to continue the tradition. It’s especially exciting to be putting Albatross out into the world for the first time on vinyl. That record holds a special place.”
Big Wreck succeeds another popular Canadian rock band of the era, The Tragically Hip, who were last year’s ambassadors. This week, Post Malone was named 2025 Record Store Day Ambassador for the U.S.
Head here for a list of participating Record Store Day Canada stores.
—Richard Trapunski
Last Week: A Closer Look at Canada’s Export Power
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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At least half a dozen distributors and record labels are frustrated with the streaming service Napster due to late royalty payments, executives tell Billboard. In some cases, rights holders say Napster is a few months behind schedule; in others, the lag on payments is well over a year.
Napster, despite its history as a pirate-disruptor to the recorded music business around the turn of the century, has long operated as a licensed streaming service, albeit a small one. But “for years, they have cited fundraising struggles as an excuse for delayed royalty payments,” according to one executive at a distributor who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Napster’s CEO, Jon Vlassopulos, declined to comment.
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Napster is not the first streamer accused of falling behind on payouts. A lawsuit against TIDAL in 2021 revealed that the platform had $127 million in liabilities, mostly in the form of unpaid streaming fees to record labels. TIDAL CEO Jesse Dorogusker told Billboard in 2023 that the payment situation had been remedied following TIDAL’s acquisition by Block.
More recently, labels and distributors have said they are struggling to get timely payments from Boomplay, a streaming service with a large user base in Africa. In December, Sony Music pulled its catalog from the platform.
At the end of 2023, Boomplay said it had 98 million monthly active users across Africa. Napster is considerably smaller: It had a little more than 1 million monthly active users at the end of 2020, according to Music Ally.
Rights holders acknowledged to Billboard that the royalties they had received in the past from Napster account for just a small fraction — often less than 1% — of their overall streaming income. “What we earn from it as a distributor isn’t that much,” says an executive at another distribution company that is missing many months of Napster payments.
“But,” he continues, “in terms of payouts to the artists and the labels who we represent, it can be a solid sum of money.” $100,000, for example, may be a drop in the bucket for a volume distributor. However, that money can make a meaningful difference for a small indie label.
Napster launched in June 1999 as a file-sharing service that allowed users to download tracks for free. It was soon battling copyright infringement lawsuits from various heavy-hitters, including Metallica, Dr. Dre and the RIAA. “Napster is not developing a business around legitimate MP3 music files, but has chosen to build its business on large-scale piracy,” the RIAA wrote in a suit filed in 1999.
This first version of Napster shut down in 2001. The following year, Bertelsmann announced that it would acquire the service and turn it into a licensed listening platform. But a judge later blocked the sale.
In the years since, Napster has bounced from one home to another. It was first acquired by Roxio and then by Best Buy for $121 million in 2008. Three years later, Napster was scooped up by Rhapsody, an early music streaming service. Rhapsody subsequently rebranded itself as Napster in 2016.
In 2020, the virtual reality concert app MelodyVR bought Napster for $70 million. The company changed hands yet again in 2022, with Hivemind Capital Partners and cryptocurrency company Algorand becoming the new owners.
Vlassopulos took over as Napster’s CEO in the fall of 2022 following a stint as global head of music at Roblox. Two decades before, he had worked at Bertelsmann and been part of the team that put together the deal for Napster — only to have it scuttled months later. “It always stayed with me: What if we could have finished what we started?” Vlassopulos explained in an interview last year.
But first, he had to work on “cleaning up the Napster business.” “The company had been around for 20 years, and so now we’ve modernized,” Vlassopulos added. “We’re right at break even, and we’re kind of in a process now to raise material funds, or the company is maybe looking to roll us up into something bigger.”
Despite this progress, some rights holders told Billboard that they were considering pulling their catalogs from Napster, or no longer delivering new releases to the platform.
When labels and distributors are not receiving payments from streaming services, taking their catalogs off platforms is one of their only options. The other is to take legal action against the streamer.
But litigation is costly and time-consuming, which means rights holders are usually stuck sending follow-up emails over and over again. This hasn’t worked for several companies trying to get money owed to them by Napster, though. “Not only have they failed to pay royalties,” says the first distribution executive, “but they have also been unresponsive when we’ve attempted to resolve these matters.”
Though making and distributing music has become easier than ever, the number of tracks being uploaded to digital service providers has fallen — not increased — in the last two years.
In the first quarter of 2023, an average of 120,000 tracks were being uploaded to DSPs each day, up from 93,400 in 2022, according to Luminate. That number dropped to 103,500 for the full year of 2023 and fell further to 99,000 last year, according to the company’s recently released 2024 year-end report. Normally, a decrease in the amount of new music tracked by Luminate wouldn’t merit much attention. But a 4% annual decline in new tracks is notable when today’s creators have an unprecedented number of tools to make music — including easy-to-use digital audio workstations like BandLab and generative artificial intelligence apps such as Suno — and can tap into global distribution.
Music professionals Billboard spoke to for this story pointed to numerous possible explanations for the drop in new tracks, with anti-fraud measures being the most widely cited reason for the decline. Bad actors are known to upload large numbers of tracks through do-it-yourself distributors before hacking into users’ streaming accounts to stream the songs. Erik Söderblom, chief product officer for music distributor Amuse, cites Spotify’s policy changes announced in 2023 to discourage labels and distributors from uploading tracks used to inflate streaming activity for the drop. “It has been a successful way for both of them as a DSP and us as a distributor to discourage fraudulent actors who abuse the system by releasing and monetizing large volumes of audio files through artificial streams,” he says.
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Beatdapp, which can identify when users’ accounts are hijacked and turned into bot farms that unknowingly stream music, has seen fraud rates decrease on the platforms it works with, says CEO Morgan Hayduk. While a small 4% decline in the scheme of millions of new tracks suggests there’s still ample music for these bot farms to illegally stream, Hayduk believes the financial penalties are having their intended effect. “I do think the DIY space is taking their end more seriously and trying not to be a conduit for this,” he says.
French streaming service Deezer introduced an “artist-centric” royalty payout scheme in 2023 to combat fraud and prioritize professional music over “functional” music such as background noise and nature sounds. But given Spotify’s far larger user base, the platform’s anti-fraud measures get more credit for creating outcomes favorable to artists and record labels. For instance, in 2023, Spotify began levying penalties on music distributors and labels when fraudulent tracks they uploaded had been detected. As a result, experts tell Billboard, better policing at the source of the problem could have resulted in distributors being wary of working with some creators.
While the anti-fraud measures may have had the intended effect and prevented some tracks from being uploaded, DistroKid, another self-serve distributor of independent artists, actually sent more tracks to DSPs in 2024 than the prior year. “There wasn’t a decrease in tracks uploaded to streaming services through DistroKid in 2024,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Billboard. “The average number of tracks uploaded to streaming services each day steadily increased throughout the year.”
As for other, lesser factors, a likely candidate is Spotify’s 2023 decision to set a minimum threshold for royalty payouts at 1,000 streams. The policy received mixed reactions. Some critics called the threshold a penalty for developing artists who rely on royalties to help build their careers. But cutting off payments to the outer reaches of the long tail put Spotify in sync with major labels’ recent push for royalty accounting schemes that reward professional artists at the expense of, as Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge put it in 2023, “merchants of garbage.”
Ending the practice of cutting tiny royalty checks may help DSPs’ goal of prioritizing professional musicians over a sea of unwanted content, but “may also dishearten early-stage artists who struggle to grow their project,” says Söderblom. As a result, fewer uploads would mean fewer new tracks could enter Luminate’s database. Will Page, author of Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming Your Business, believes that the payout threshold likely had “a material effect on what Luminate gets to count.” After Spotify set a threshold for payouts at 1,000 streams, an artist would experience diminishing returns from uploading more unpopular music. According to Luminate, 93.2 million of the 202.2 million tracks in its database were streamed fewer than 10 times. Page, Spotify’s former chief economist, estimates that 99% of the 99,000 new tracks in 2024 made the recording artist less than $100 in royalties last year.
Anti-fraud measures and artist-centric royalty schemes may not account for all of the decline, though. Another factor could be a natural ebb in the supply of music. Söderblom sees 2022 as “a great year for DIY” because many artists had additional time to work on new music due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The combination of accessible music production and distribution tools and a more or less global lockdown led to a huge influx of releases,” he says. “As the world returns to normal, it seems natural to see the volume of new uploads decline.” The same could be true of video creators. Last week, MIDiA Research declared that “the pandemic-induced content creation boom has peaked” after time spent creating content such as YouTube videos dropped in the second quarter of 2024 — marking the first decline since 2021.
Similarly, the 120,000 tracks uploaded daily in 2022 may have marked a peak of musicians uploading their back catalogs to distributors. MIDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan has surveyed amateur and semi-professional creators for five years. “A lot of them are in their 40s and 50s, and probably a lot are people who have been playing in bar bands and whatever else,” says Mulligan. “And they say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these demos. Let’s put them on Spotify.’ And so, they had a lot of back catalog that hadn’t been digitized before to put up there.” Those tracks weren’t necessarily new, but they were new to DIY distributors and streaming platforms. Once the backlog runs out, these artists may not have any other recordings to distribute.
Yet another explanation is the rise of social media as a destination for new music. Music streaming platforms and DIY distribution have leveled the playing field and given every artist an opportunity to reach listeners around the world. Still, many artists have realized they aren’t the next Taylor Swift and can’t get much traction at services such as Spotify and Apple Music. Streaming can work wonders for big artists, but the promise of democratization “has lost a lot of sheen,” says Mulligan. Small artists who don’t attract a crowd at Spotify can use social media or user-generated platforms such as Audiomack to connect with listeners. “They would rather have a small fan base who they can interact with than a large audience they can’t interact with,” he says. “Add that with the remuneration issue and it’s a much less compelling premise to go on streaming now than it was three, four years ago.”
If Mulligan’s hypothesis is true, the artist-centric approach adopted by Spotify, Deezer and others could end up hurting its biggest proponents: the major labels. Streaming platforms have essentially told long-tail artists, “We’re not going to stop you from coming in, but you’re not really welcome,” says Mulligan, which he thinks could have unintended consequences somewhere down the road. “Stop a generation of artists coming in,” he says, “and there’s a really good risk that you’ll inadvertently stop a generation of fans coming in if those artists go elsewhere to build their fan bases.”
In fall 2023, Deezer announced it was adopting an “artist-centric” royalty model with Universal Music Group (UMG) in an effort to better compensate acts with significant followings and the rightsholders who own their recordings. That move, intended to tackle fraud and reduce royalties flowing to what is essentially noise and “functional music” was intended to rebalance a streaming model that some major players believe needs reform. Other major labels followed, as did Spotify, which made different adjustments to its royalty model toward the same end.
On Wednesday (Jan. 15), Deezer and the French PRO SACEM announced a deal to compensate publishing rightsholders the same way. “We started a year and a half ago with UMG and then the other majors,” said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier. “And now we’re doing it on the publishing side.”
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SACEM’s interest in this idea goes back to an analysis of the potential effects of artist-centric royalty payouts that the PRO conducted last year. “The first thing I wanted was to remove noise from the revenue, especially at a time when dilution is an issue” said SACEM CEO Cécile Rap-Veber, “The second thing is that it helps prevent fraud.”
While Deezer will not remove any music from its platform as a result of this agreement, the service will either demonetize or essentially allocate less royalties to some tracks, by boosting the royalties earned by others. The change, which will take effect soon, could help labels and services better prepare for the age of AI, when music executives worry that online services will be flooded by unpopular, low-value music that cuts into their business with sheer scale. “With AI coming,” Rap-Veber says, “we’re afraid that human creation might be affected.”
Deezer’s specific plans are more ambitious than what it did on the recording side. Like other artist-centric models, artists get a royalty boost for hitting a measure of popularity — in this case, double royalties for songs that are actively searched out or those by artists with 1,000 streams a month from 500 different subscribers.
More interesting, the service will impose what it calls a “user centric cap” that will limit how much the listening choices of any individual subscriber can affect royalty payouts, which will also make fraud more difficult and less efficient. Also, Deezer will completely exclude from the royalty pool tracks that consist of noise and “functional sounds,” such as rain on a roof; instead, Deezer will recommend similar music that it owns, which will not count for payout purposes and thus not take royalties from other rightsholders. (Some of these tracks might not even be considered copyrighted works under EU law, at least on the publishing side. While recording the sound of rain on a roof might arguably involve creative choices, there is no composer in the sense of copyright law.) Deezer will also remove tracks that have not been streamed in a year.
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was the most streamed, downloaded and highest grossing song of 2024 in the United States, according to a Billboard review of Luminate’s annual report published on Wednesday (Jan. 15).
The anthemic hip-hop-infused country song generated $6.59 million from digital song sales and on-demand audio streams in the United States for the year spanning from Dec. 29, 2023 to Jan. 2, 2025, having spent a historic 19 weeks in the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.
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The top 10 most digitally consumed songs of 2024 as identified by Luminate generated a combined $53.4 million from on-demand audio streams, such as when the song is played on Spotify, and digital song sales, like when a digital download is purchased through Apple’s music store.
Another country crossover hit, Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen, took the No. 2 spot on Luminate’s list, and generated $5.76 million from sales and on-demand audio streams, while Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” came in third on that list, and generated $5.65 million. Those royalties are paid out to an artist’s record label and music publisher; Billboard was not able to determine the artists’ share of those earnings.
The remainder of the top 10 most digitally consumed songs were Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” which earned $5.57 million; Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which earned $5.63 million; Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” which earned $5.2 million; Zach Bryan’s 2023 release featuring Kacey Musgraves, “I Remember Everything,” which generated $5.03 million; Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby,” which earned $4.99 million; Billie Eilish’s “BIRDS OF A FEATHER,” which earned $4.53 million; and Hozier’s “Too Sweet,” which generated $4.39 million.
Lamar’s “Not Like Us” ranked fifth, behind Swims’ “Lose Control,” on the list of most streamed and downloaded songs. However, “Not Like Us” generated slightly more money than “Lose Control” — “Not Like Us” netted $5.63 million compared to $5.57 million for “Lose Control” — because it was streamed 37.7 million more times. While “Lose Control” had more digital downloads, and a single digital download pays out more than a single stream, digital sales for both songs only totaled 430,000.
As the music industry’s leading data provider, Luminate tracks consumption data from more than 500 retailers, streaming and radio companies, among others. This top 10 list from Luminate’s report focused on digital song sales and on-demand audio streams because around 90% of music consumption activity comes from digital formats in the U.S. Luminate stripped out video streams from this year’s chart because of a change in how one company provided video data in 2024.
These 10 songs made an additional $30.3 million from video streams, programmed streams, such as a play on satellite radio, and radio airplay spins in the U.S. Including that revenue, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” was still the top money-making hit with $10.74 million, but Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” came in second with $10.22 million, largely because of its success on radio and programmed streams. The songs would have also made additional revenue from sales and streams around the world, metrics that are not included in Luminate’s ranking.
Some songs did particularly well on video. Lamar’s Drake diss track “Not Like Us” had more than 216 million on-demand video streams in the U.S. last year, which generated over $1 million from master recording and publishing rights, Billboard estimates.
Here is Luminate’s full list of the top 10 songs of 2024 ranked by sales and streaming-equivalent units based on on-demand audio streams with Billboard‘s estimates on how much money each song generated from those categories.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
A mere four months after the arrest of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the first of many announced documentaries surrounding his federal racketeering and sex trafficking allegations has landed. Following a shocking trailer released two weeks ago, Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy documentary is here and now available to stream online exclusively on Peacock.
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The 90-minute documentary tracks the hip-hop mogul, from his early life struggles to his rise to fame within the music industry. There are several appearances throughout the doc from members in Diddy’s inner circle including former employees, childhood friends, bodyguards, and even a Making The Band contestant, all recounting their tales of dealing with Combs throughout his career. However, the most notable appearance is from singer Al B. Sure!, who details accusations regarding domestic abuse and death of Kim Porter, his and Combs late former partner.
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This is the first documentary to be released regarding Diddy’s sexual abuse allegations, but it won’t be the last. 50 Cent has already publicly announced that his G-Unit film division is producing their own doc surrounding Puff. Until then, check out how you can watch the Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy below.
How to Stream ‘The Making of a Bad Boy’ Diddy Documentary
Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy documentary premiered on Jan. 14, exclusively streaming on Peacock. Peacock subscribers can stream the new Diddy documentary online for free. Not subscribed? For just $7.99/month, the streaming service offers access to live sports, original TV programming, movies and specials, including the Diddy doc. Sign up here or below.
Peacock lets you watch the Diddy documentary online through your phone, computer, tablet or smart TV (via the Peacock app). This special is not airing on TV so the only place to stream the Diddy Bad Boy documentary online is through Peacock.
Watch the trailer for Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy below.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Goosebumps: The Vanishing, the second spooky installment in the Disney+ anthology series has finally arrived. Premiering on Jan. 10, fans can stream all episodes exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu.
Inspired by R.L. Stine’s worldwide best-selling books, the new season follows twins Devin and Cece, who are sent to spend a summer in New York with their divorced dad, scientist Anthony Brewer. The pair must band together with a few new friends to save their Brooklyn neighborhood from a long-dormant threat. Because it’s an anthology series, the new season welcomes in a brand-new cast with Friends star David Schwimmer leading the pack.
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For fans of the books, Goosebumps: The Vanishing is based on the author’s second entry in the horror novel series, Stay Out of the Basement. If you haven’t read the books, or looking to catch up on a few classic spooky stories, the Goosebumps box set is a must-have for any fan. Featuring 20 popular novels in the series, relive fan favorites including The Haunted Mask, One Day at Horrorland and Night of the Living Dummy.
‘Goosebumps’ 20-Book Box Set
For more Goosebumps thrills, the 2015 film and its Haunted Halloween sequel are more lighthearted entries into the series. Starring Jack Black, the pair of movies are standalone stories that aren’t based on any singular book, but rather celebrates the entire franchise as a whole. The films feature several classic monsters, ghouls and ghosts from the novels including Slappy the dummy and the abominable snowman.
‘Goosebumps’ Blu-Ray + DVD
‘Goosebumps 2’ Blu-Ray + DVD
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Here’s How to Watch ‘Goosebumps: The Vanishing’
Goosebumps: The Vanishing premiered on Jan. 10 exclusively on Disney+ and Hulu. If you’re already a member of the streaming service, just sign on to gain access to the series. For newcomers, Disney+ offers a variety of subscription options starting at just $9.99/month, which grants you access to the entire Disney library, including the Elton John: Never Too Late documentary, original and exclusive content from Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and more.
Ditch the ads with Disney+’s premium plan for $15.99/month, or consume even more content with a mix of bundle options that include Hulu and ESPN+ starting at $10.99/month. If you’re interested in live TV, you can even bundle with Hulu + Live TV. Sign up for the bundle plan here or below.
Get prepared for your next horror binge by checking out the trailer for Goosebumps: The Vanishing below.