Positive Trends for Independent Musicians: Insights from Luminate 2024 Midyear Report

The Luminate 2024 Midyear Report reveals positive trends for independent musicians and highlights critical shifts in consumer behavior, streaming patterns, and emerging genres.

Positive trends for independent musicians

by Chris Robley of Reverbnation Blog

Luminate’s Midyear Music Report for 2024 contains some interesting lessons for musicians.

The report also suggests that despite many recent controversies — such as Spotify royalty changes, Deezer catalog changes, and the spectre of endless AI-generated music competing with human creativity —  things actually seem MORE promising for lower and mid-tier independent artists. 

So let’s look at some of the report’s key takeaways, from the perspective of a career-minded musician. 

What is Luminate’s Midyear Music Report?

Luminate (formerly Neilsen Music) is a company that provides analytics about the music and entertainment industries. 

The Midyear Music Report is an impressive and impressively-interactive study of music engagement and consumer habits over the past 6 months. 

The report measures 23 trillion data points. From thousands of artists. In more than 50 genres. In 48 markets. Gathered from 500+ sources across streaming, social, retail, and airplay. 

Here are some encouraging numbers…

Streaming is (still) growing

The rate of streaming adoption differs greatly depending on the market, but when measured worldwide: streaming is up significantly. 

On-demand audio streaming grew 15.1% when compared to the first half of 2023. 

Independent music is capturing more of the attention

Not only has streaming grown overall, so too has the share of total streams commanded by independent musicians:

As the report states:

Did you know that indie artists made up 62.1% of all artists who accumulated between 1M and 10M U.S. On-Demand Audio streams in (the first half) of 2024?

In fact, the share of indie artists who earned more than 500M On-Demand Audio streams increased by more than 2% in H1 2024 as compared to H2 2023.

So how many artists garnered between 1 million and 10 million streams in H1 of 2024? 

29,253.

Of which 62.1% were NOT major label acts. 

This is great news for the large and growing segment of music-creators who fall between obscurity and superstardom. 

So “middle-tier” artists are doing better?

Yes, they’re commanding more attention. That being said, some news outlets have covered this story and used the term “middle class artist” instead.

It’s maybe a small point, but I do want to address my concern about confusing these two terms. Middle-tier accurately describes the large cohort of artists between the listening extremes, with the less-than-a-thousand crowd on the one side, and the billion-streams club on the other. 

“Middle class artist” (at least to me) implies specific earnings or economic status. And while plenty of these middle-tier artists will not only earn streaming revenue, but also download and merch sales, concert ticket sales, sync licensing fees, and more — middle-tier streaming activity on its own may not equal middle class earnings, particularly if revenue is split between multiple collaborators, co-writers, etc.

Again, streaming doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so there’s overlap between middle-tier and middle-class artists, but… I just wanted to add a word of caution about the good news headlines. 

My caveats aside, overall streaming growth combined with middle-tier artist growth IS unambiguously great news. 

Is your oldest music still new? 

I’ve been saying for years that even your oldest music will be brand new to most listeners. 

And in some ways, given our passive consumption environment driven by algorithmic recommendation and playlists, release-dates matter less than ever. 

This slide suggests as much:

Now when Luminate tracks “deep catalog” activity, they’re really looking at a whole history of recorded music’s biggest hits. So of course that’s still attracting massive attention. 

But as Kevin Breuner and I have discussed on plenty of occasions, our own kids really don’t care about release dates. They don’t know if a song came out in the 1960s, the 80s, 2010, or yesterday. 

If they haven’t heard it, and they hear it, and they like it, they like it. 

So the power of catalog is more than just the gravity it holds for nostalgic generations. It’s something simpler: It’s good music. And if your oldest tracks are great too, they can have the same impact on new listeners. 

How encouraging!

The lesson? Develop strategies to market your back catalog. 

A.I. ain’t got nuthin’ on us!

This next idea is not taken from the report, but I was thinking that if catalog music is still so valuable, and if middle-tier artist engagement is on the rise,…

… aren’t both of those things combined proof that demand for human creativity is still enormously high? 

Perhaps our fears that robots will replace us are a bit overblown. 

AI tools are opening a world of new possibilities for human artists. And this Luminate report actually makes me more excited to see how those tools are used by that same group of middle-tier creators who are already attracting listeners, driving trends, and innovating by necessity in their production and music marketing tactics. 

Physical formats are important

There’s so much data to dig into regarding CD and vinyl sales that I’m going to write a dedicated article. But the TLDR is: You (probably) should offer physical music formats!

Results vary by genre, of course, but a a significant amount of music engagement and revenue is still driven by the purchase of CD and vinyl:

Paid streaming subscribers who are fans of K-Pop and Latin Music in particular are very likely to purchase physical formats:

Diehard fans also love variants (CD, vinyl, cassette, etc), different color vinyl, different album cover options, bonus editions, and more. 

Acts like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish are able to pull that off in a much more robust way, but the lesson remains: 

Make your music merch feel like a collector’s item. Rare. Crafted. Worth the higher price.

Enjoying the real world? Thank Gen Z!

If you believe Gen Z is maximally online, you’d only be half right. It now also appears that this demographic is the most likely to attend live concerts:

So if you’re glad your favorite act is still able to tour, maybe stop making fun of Gen Z’s smartphone habits and thank them for going out and paying to see live music!

And if you are a member of Gen Z (ages 15-27), pat yourself on the back and keep attending as many shows as you can now. Because nothing slows down your nightlife quite like kids and careers. 😱

TikTok is still on top

Thankfully, people seem to be listening to music more often than they choose other leisure activities like sports, reading, podcasts, and short-form video. But when they combine music consumption with short-form video, where do listeners turn? 

TikTok.

YouTube Shorts seems to be catching up quickly though.

Lesson? Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have made huge moves; and talk of TikTok bans or forced acquisitions in the USA have caused some musicians to assume they can or should abandon the app. 

Users tell a different story.

Of course you should only be active as an artist on platforms that align with your values and interests, but if you want to be where the people are, the people are on TikTok.

Video drives gig attendance

Think the average TikTok user just sits on the couch staring at their screen all day? 

Nope! They occasionally take short breaks to go see concerts. ; )

This stat may overlap with the Gen Z and TikTok observations above, but it’s interesting on its own as well: Short-form video users are 38% more likely to go to live concerts. 

Which is a delightful counter to the expected narrative. And it’s something that artists like Windborne have know for years: 

You can effectively reach audiences and promote live events via geo-tagged video content on TikTok!

Gamers will pay you more

According to Luminate’s report, gamers across the generations are more likely to buy music merch:

Is the lesson that you should promote music to gamers?

Not necessarily. Though “gaming” is a broad term and touches many audiences, it’s probably true that certain genres like EDM, rock, hip-hop, lo-fi, pop, and maybe even contemporary classical will perform better with gamers than things like folk, jazz, children’s music, etc. 

But if you DO make music that will resonate with gamers, and want to be active in the places they’re already hanging out, here’s where to go:

Partner with the platforms

One of the studies I found the most interesting asked which features are most important for music consumers when they’re considering their loyalty to any particular streaming platform:

HiFi audio has become LESS important to consumers. 

What’s most important? Access to the artists! 

Things like exclusive content, updates from the artist, news about the artist, and livestreaming. 

If that’s what platform users want — closer relationships and access to you, the artist — think of yourself as a partner in the platform’s client-retention efforts. Give the DSPs what they want, and you’ll probably benefit from increased visibility.

The challenge for an artist running their own career, of course, is to provide “exclusive” content to numerous platforms. By definition, that’s not scalable. 

But it does highlight that you SHOULD be providing exclusive content to at least the largest platforms.

For instance, Spotify Clips and Canvas, or Pandora AMP’s Artist Audio Messaging. 

Conclusion

There’s so much more in Luminate’s report, and I’ve just commented on aspects I found most relevant for independent musicians.

If you want to check out the whole thing, and I think you should (even just to marvel at the design), go here.