English Fell to 87.1% of US Streams, a Historic Low
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The American genre ranking looks stable at the top and is moving underneath. R&B and hip-hop still take roughly a quarter of all on-demand audio in the United States, one stream in four, and no other genre is close to displacing it. The figure that actually moved in Luminate’s midyear count is not a genre position at all. It is language: English-language listening fell to 87.1% of US streams, the lowest share on record.
That is a small number in absolute terms and a large one in direction. Spanish-language tracks now take 9.4%, close to one stream in ten, and the UK share of American listening rose 0.8 percentage points to 7.8%. American artists still account for more than two-thirds of domestic streams, so the market is not turning over. It is diversifying at the margin, and the margin is where ranking changes start.
Dance and Electronic Took the Biggest Share Gain
Among genres, the largest US growth belongs to dance and electronic, up 0.51 share points on the period. That is the single biggest positional move in the ranking, and it came from two different directions at once.
The first is current: John Summit and Disco Lines are both pulling meaningful volume, which is the normal way a genre gains share. The second is older and more interesting. A set of viral tracks from 2015 to 2017 has returned to heavy rotation, with The Chainsmokers’ “Closer” among the titles driving it. A nine-year-old record producing fresh streams is a catalogue re-entry rather than a new release, and catalogue behaves differently from frontline: it does not decay on a release schedule, and it responds to platform and social trends rather than to marketing spend.
For a genre share, the two sources are not equivalent. A gain built on current artists is a bet the genre can keep making records people want. A gain built on a nostalgia cycle is borrowed from a specific set of titles and will unwind when the cycle does. Dance and electronic currently has both, which is a stronger position than either alone.
Spanish Reached Nearly One Stream in Ten
The Spanish-language figure is the one worth watching over several reporting periods rather than one. At 9.4% it is no longer a niche within the American market, and Latin casual listenership in the US peaked at 54% in the first quarter, meaning more than half of American listeners engage with the genre at least occasionally.
Casual listenership and stream share are different measurements and they say different things. A 54% casual figure describes reach: how many people the music touches at all. A 9.4% stream share describes depth: how much of the total listening it actually accounts for. The gap between the two is the space a genre grows into, and on these numbers it is wide.
The export ranking supports the same reading. Brazil now sits eighth among music-exporting countries, driven by Alok and Anitta, while South Korea holds third position on the strength of BTS. Neither country exports primarily in English, and both are gaining ground in a market that has historically been measured almost entirely in English-language consumption.
Where the Growth Actually Is
Global on-demand audio streams reached 2.8 trillion in the period, up 9.8%. The split behind that total is the more useful figure. Streams outside the United States came to 2.0 trillion and grew 11.8%. American streams reached 732.7 billion and grew 4.8%.
So the rest of the world is growing at roughly two and a half times the American rate, from a base already close to three times the size. The US is no longer the engine of volume growth in recorded music; it is a large, mature market growing steadily while the expansion happens elsewhere.
That reframes the language numbers considerably. English falling to 87.1% of US streams is not an isolated American curiosity. It is the domestic edge of a global position in which non-English repertoire has more listeners, more growth and more export weight than at any previous point in the streaming era. World music also shows 34% of its streams coming from current tracks aged 0 to 18 months, a notably high proportion of new material for any category.
CDs Rose 16% and Not Only Because of K-Pop
Physical formats produced the period’s most counterintuitive tally. CD sales reached 16.3 million units, up 16%. The obvious explanation is K-pop, whose album packaging drives large physical volumes, and the Mass Market retail channel now accounts for close to 30% of all physical sales largely on that basis.
But the explanation does not survive the control. Strip K-pop out of the figure entirely and CD sales are still up 6.7%. The format is growing on its own terms as well as on the back of one genre’s packaging strategy, which is a different and more durable finding.
Vinyl grew 2.4% over the same period, a much shallower slope. After a decade in which vinyl was the physical growth story and the CD was treated as a legacy format, the two have swapped positions in the ranking. Readers following the format tally will find the revenue side of the same picture in our earlier report that US CD sales rose 58.6% while downloads fell 12.7%.
What a Share Point Is Actually Worth
Share-point movements read as small until they are converted back into volume, and on a base this size the conversion is unforgiving. One percentage point of the American total is roughly 7.3 billion streams over the half year. Dance and electronic’s 0.51-point gain therefore represents something in the region of 3.7 billion additional US streams, which is the kind of number that funds a touring circuit rather than a rounding adjustment in a report.
The same arithmetic applies to the language figures, and it is why the historic low matters commercially rather than only symbolically. English losing share does not mean English-language music lost listeners: the total pool of US streams grew 4.8%, so a smaller slice of a larger pie can still be more absolute listening than the year before. What changes is the competitive position. Every playlist slot, radio add and editorial placement is allocated against a share model, and share models follow the ranking rather than the raw tally.
It also explains why the R&B and hip-hop position is worth watching even though it is unchanged at the top. Holding a quarter of a growing market is a harder job than holding a quarter of a flat one, because the genres gaining share are gaining it from somewhere. When the largest genre stops gaining and the fourth-largest posts the biggest move, the interesting question is not who leads the ranking this period but who is closing the gap and at what rate.
The Superfan Tally
Luminate puts US superfans at 20% of music listeners, defined as engaging with music in five or more distinct ways. Split by behaviour, 22% are purchase-based and 17% engagement-based, with 11% doing both.
The demographic breakdown is the commercially relevant part. Gen Z and Millennials make up 63% of engagement-based superfans, so the group that drives social and platform activity skews young. Income runs the other way from the usual assumption: 42% of purchase-based superfans and 39% of engagement-based superfans live in households earning over $100,000, against 26% of listeners overall.
That combination, young and comparatively affluent, is why the superfan measurement has moved from a marketing curiosity to a line in strategy documents. It identifies the fifth of the audience most likely to buy a physical edition, a ticket or a piece of merchandise, and it does so independently of which genre they happen to listen to.
What the AI Numbers Show So Far
The generative-AI figures are more measured than the surrounding discourse. Among US musicians, 54% report positive feelings about generative AI tools, against 35% of non-musicians. Actual use is narrower: 18% of musicians use AI to edit or remix music, compared with 6% of non-musicians.
The chart position tells the clearest story. The highest-ranking AI-assisted song in the period, “Papaoutai (Afro Soul)” by Chill77 and Unjaps, reached number 282 globally with 210.7 million streams across weeks one to twenty-four. That is a substantial tally by any normal standard and a long way from the top of the ranking.
Taken together, the period’s numbers describe a market changing along several axes at once rather than in one direction. Language share is moving, the fastest-growing genre is being lifted partly by nine-year-old records, the supposedly dead format is outgrowing the revived one, and the loudest technology story is charting at 282. Luminate chief executive Rob Jonas framed this as the first combined music and film-television midyear report, on the grounds that the industries are converging. The music figures alone suggest the convergence worth tracking is between markets, not media. Full tables are in Luminate’s midyear report.
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