The largest city (Shanghai) in China, where recorded music revenue jumped 25.9% YoY in 2023, per the IFPI. In its latest weekly report, DMN Pro analyzed how these and other strong showings from developing markets factor into tall industry growth forecasts, including from Goldman Sach’s “Music in the Air,” for the remainder of the 2020s. Photo Credit: Hanny Naibaho
Goldman Sachs’ “Music in the Air” report has forecasted over $163 billion worth of industry gross revenue for 2030, in part because of anticipated streaming growth throughout emerging markets. But is the prediction, covering recorded, publishing, and live alike, a bit too bullish?
In its newest weekly report, DMN Pro dove into the interesting (and involved) subject across 10 detail-oriented pages, covering all manner of pertinent data and seldom-discussed angles in the process. And while there are several especially valuable takeaways as a result, the streaming-specific findings are particularly noteworthy.
That’s partially due to Music in the Air’s aggressive vision for how exactly emerging markets will factor into the music landscape. As many already know – and as a growing pile of data is driving home – subscriber growth is slowing in developed industries from the States to South Korea, where Spotify is embracing ad-supported listening.
Among other things, the plateau means there’s a greater focus on the monetization potential of quick-rising and largely streaming-driven emerging markets. “Emerging markets will make up 70% of new streaming music subscribers by 2030,” maintained Goldman, attributing a slightly reduced compound annual streaming growth rate, 10% through 2030, to elements including “the shift to subscription revenue from emerging markets.”
By the numbers, that refers to $49.7 billion in paid streaming gross revenue for 2030, nearly double 2023’s $26.4 billion, and a cool 647 million paid subscribers in emerging markets (up from 300 million in 2023), per Music in the Air.
(Concert fans, who already aren’t hesitating to voice ticket-price complaints, will be coughing up even more should Music in the Air’s 2030 live entertainment net revenue forecast, $51.7 billion against $33.1 billion in 2023, prove accurate.)
But is a material medium-term monetization boom really in the cards for these emerging/developing markets? As laid out by DMN Pro, there are too many moving parts (and in an industry where each recent year has delivered sweeping changes on multiple fronts) to reach a definitive conclusion at present.
However, that doesn’t leave us without evidence of streaming’s historical monetization difficulties in emerging markets – adoption isn’t the exclusive problem, as India is still proving hard to monetize despite ranking second to the U.S. in total on-demand streams – and more recent trends.
Attached to individual regions and countries as opposed to the overly broad “developing markets” categorization itself, the trends are exceedingly important when it comes to gauging the industry’s trajectory.
Just at the top level, MENA was for a time the fastest-growing recorded music market of any region, but posted a comparatively modest 14.4% expansion in 2023, according to the IFPI. As streaming accounts for nearly all the revenue at hand, the percentage is indicative of on-demand listening changes, which, in turn, can paint a fuller picture when considered alongside the performance breakdowns of MENA streaming platform Anghami.
The same is true of China’s rapidly expanding music market at the intersection of overall industry results and subscriber trends at Tencent Music. The weekly report covers a variety of other pertinent areas as well, with an emphasis on providing a more comprehensive look at streaming’s path forward in the coming six years.
