India Poised To Surpass USA: Could Lead Global Music Streaming Market Volume In 2024

The dwindling market share of English-language music on global streaming services is prominently underscored by statistics presented in Luminate's recent Year-End report for 2023. According to Luminate, the annual share of English-language content among the world's Top 10,000 streaming tracks, encompassing both audio and video on-demand streams, was 67% in 2021, dropping to 62.1% in 2022, and further decreasing to 54.9% in 2023. This downward trend suggests an imminent dip below the 50% mark.

Conversely, non-English-language music secured 45.1% of streams among the Top 10,000 on-demand streaming tracks globally in 2023. Among these tracks, the top five languages were English (54.9%), Spanish (10.1%), Hindi (7.8%), Korean (2.4%), and Japanese (2.1%).

Despite the global success of Latin music, the share of Spanish-language music in the world's Top 10,000 on-demand streaming tracks declined from 12.4% in 2021 to 10.1% in 2023. However, the most notable narrative in this context emerges from India.

Luminate reports a significant surge in Hindi-language music's market share of the world's Top 10,000 streaming tracks, more than doubling from 3.8% in 2021 to 7.8% in 2023. This rapid rise is attributed to the remarkable increase in the total volume of music streams in India.

In 2023, India witnessed just over 1 trillion total on-demand music streams (video + audio), precisely 1.037 trillion. This marked the world's second-largest annual streaming volume by market, trailing only behind the USA (1.454 trillion plays). India's streaming volume was nearly three times larger than the third-ranking country, Brazil (373.5 billion streams).

Furthermore, India experienced the most substantial year-over-year increase in total annual on-demand music streams globally, with a remarkable uptick of nearly half a trillion plays (+463.7 billion) compared to 2022. In contrast, the US saw a year-over-year increase of just 184.0 billion. If this trend persists, India could closely compete with the USA as the world's leading music streaming nation in terms of total on-demand play volume in 2024, especially if the expected slowdown in annual streaming volume growth occurs in the US.