1. Introduction
The music industry has entered a new era, one driven not just by culture and creativity, but by data, transparency, and investment potential. Every year, two reports set the tone for understanding this shift: the IFPI’s Global Music Report and Spotify’s Loud & Clear platform. While one captures macro trends across formats and geographies, the other offers insight into how royalties actually flow to artists and rights holders. Together, they provide a rare lens into a fast-maturing financial ecosystem.
As the music world evolves into an investable asset class, these reports are more than just snapshots, they’re compasses. They help institutions, platforms, and individual investors navigate a space where tradition meets technology, and where artistic success translates into measurable, recurring income.
2. Why These Reports Matter for Music Rights Investors
Music is no longer just a creative pursuit, it’s a structured economy. For years, data on royalties, growth, and distribution were either opaque or out of reach for everyday investors. This lack of visibility made it difficult to quantify the risk and reward of owning music rights. But in the past five years, two parallel forces have changed that: platforms like Bolero, which fractionalize and simplify access to rights, and global reports like those from IFPI and Spotify, which expose the underlying mechanics.
These reports matter because they:
- Offer credible benchmarking across formats (streaming, physical, sync, performance rights)
- Track revenue growth at a global level, validating long-term trends
- Reveal how artists—from emerging talents to top-charting acts—are actually compensated
- Quantify the role of language, geography, and platform in generating royalties
For anyone seeking diversification beyond equities and real estate, music rights represent a culturally rich, globally scalable, and cash-flow-generating alternative. But understanding this asset class requires credible data. That’s what these reports provide.
3. Inside the IFPI Global Music Report 2024
The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) is the global representative of the recorded music industry. Their annual Global Music Report is widely considered the definitive source of insight into the sector's financial performance and strategic dynamics.
In 2024, global recorded music revenues rose for the tenth consecutive year, reaching $29.6 billion, a 4.8% year-over-year increase. While the growth rate slightly slowed compared to previous years, the trajectory confirms the industry's robust and structural expansion.
Streaming Remains the Engine
Streaming now accounts for 69% of global recorded music revenues, surpassing the $20 billion mark for the first time. Paid subscription services contributed over $15.1 billion, driven by a global user base of 752 million accounts—an 85 million increase compared to 2023. Subscription streaming alone grew by 9.5%, underlining sustained consumer demand for access-based music consumption models.
Physical Is Resilient, Not Nostalgic
Global physical revenues declined slightly by 3.1%, reaching $4.8 billion. However, this came after an exceptional year in 2023 (+14.5%). Vinyl remains a long-term outperformer with an 18th consecutive year of growth, increasing by 4.6% in 2024 and continuing to outperform CD sales. For investors, physical formats offer a counterintuitive yet steady asset class driven by collector value and direct-to-fan marketing.
Performance and Sync: Growth Beyond Listening
Performance rights revenues grew 5.9%, totalling $2.9 billion, while synchronisation revenues (from music used in TV, advertising, or games) rose by 4.7% to $650 million. These sources now represent 9.7% and 2.2% of total global revenues respectively. This diversification reflects music’s utility across media formats and signals further monetisation opportunities.
Geographic Diversification Accelerates
Emerging markets continue to drive outsized growth:
- MENA: +22.8%, led by a streaming-dominant model (99.5% of revenues).
- Sub-Saharan Africa: +22.6%, surpassing $100M in revenue for the first time.
- Latin America: +22.5%, marking its 15th year of consecutive growth.
- Europe: +8.3%, adding more revenue than any other region, led by France (+7.5%).
Notably, Mexico entered the global top 10 music markets, overtaking Australia, with Brazil posting 21.7% growth.
4. Spotify’s Loud & Clear 2025: Royalty Flows, Demystified
Spotify's annual "Loud & Clear" report offers an in-depth examination of the streaming economy, shedding light on royalty distributions and the evolving landscape of artist earnings. The 2025 edition underscores significant trends that are reshaping the music industry's financial dynamics.
Record-Breaking Royalty Payouts
In 2024, Spotify disbursed over $10 billion to music rights holders, marking a $1 billion increase from the previous year and bringing the platform's total lifetime payouts to nearly $60 billion. This milestone not only reflects Spotify's dominant position in the streaming market but also highlights the platform's role in the broader industry resurgence, contributing to the doubling of global recorded music revenues since 2014.
Expansion of the Artist Middle Class
The data reveals a notable broadening of the artist earning spectrum:
- Nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify alone in 2024. Remarkably, 80% of these artists did not have a song featured in Spotify's Global Daily Top 50 chart, indicating that substantial earnings are attainable without mainstream chart success.
- Over 12,500 artists surpassed the $100,000 earnings mark, reflecting a growing cohort of musicians achieving sustainable incomes through streaming.
These figures suggest a democratization of revenue opportunities, where financial success is increasingly accessible to a diverse range of artists beyond the traditional top-tier acts.
Independent Sector's Ascendancy
Independent artists and labels have seen substantial financial gains:
- Collectively, they earned more than $5 billion from Spotify in 2024, accounting for approximately half of the platform's total royalty payouts.
This trend underscores the increasing viability of independent pathways in the music industry, facilitated by streaming platforms that provide direct access to global audiences.
Global Reach and Multilingual Growth
Spotify's global footprint has enabled artists to transcend local markets:
- More than 50% of artists earning over $1,000 on Spotify in 2024 derived the majority of their revenue from listeners outside their home countries.
- Music in eight different languages each generated over $100 million in royalties, a significant increase from just two languages (English and Spanish) reaching that threshold in 2017.
This highlights the platform's role in promoting cultural diversity and facilitating the global exchange of musical content.
5. What This Means for Investors: Music Rights as an Asset Class
The insights from Spotify's "Loud & Clear" report illuminate several key considerations for investors:
- Diversification of Revenue Streams: The expansion of the artist middle class and the rise of independent music signal a shift towards a more varied and less top-heavy revenue distribution. This reduces concentration risk and opens avenues for investment across a broader spectrum of artists and rights holders.
- Global Market Penetration: The significant earnings from international audiences and multilingual content underscore the importance of a global perspective in music investments. Opportunities abound in emerging markets and non-English language segments, reflecting shifting consumption patterns.
- Streaming as a Growth Catalyst: The tenfold increase in Spotify's payouts over the past decade exemplifies the transformative impact of streaming on the music industry's financial landscape. Continued growth in streaming adoption suggests sustained revenue expansion potential.
In essence, Spotify's data reflects a maturing and diversifying music ecosystem, where investment opportunities extend beyond traditional major label signings to include independent artists and international markets.
Music revenues today are not only recurring but structurally diversified—by geography, format, and rights type. In a world where streaming platforms become utilities and catalogue IP gains global liquidity, the IFPI data shows that music rights have matured into a global, resilient, and highly monetizable asset class.
Understanding these trends is essential to assessing both short-term yields and long-term capital appreciation potential of music rights.
Here’s what stands out:
Royalty Streams Are Predictable and Durable
Unlike equities, whose value is tied to market perception, royalties are based on actual usage. Whether a song is streamed, broadcast, or played live, it generates recurring payments. For high-performing tracks, this revenue can last decades.
Cultural Moments Drive Catalogue Value
Aya Nakamura’s "Pookie" entered 20 national charts after the Olympics. Kate Bush’s "Running Up That Hill" spiked 8,000% after Stranger Things. These aren’t anomalies, they’re case studies in the reactivation power of cultural events.
For investors, this means music rights are not just stable, they’re dynamic, with optionality baked in.
Diversification by Design
Music rights allow for diversification across language, genre, geography, and format. A catalogue with French rap, Latin pop, and US R&B behaves very differently from a single asset or ETF. It offers a buffer against market shocks—and a window into cultural trends.
Hedge Against Market Cycles
In 2020, while global GDP shrank, music revenues grew by 7%. This resilience isn’t random, it’s structural. Music consumption is habitual, emotional, and non-cyclical. As such, royalties tend to be decorrelated from traditional markets.
Music isn’t just recession-proof, it’s relevance-proof.
Music rights are now an asset class in their own right. Driven by recurring revenues, international exposure and opportunities to increase their value in the event of cultural events, they offer a serious alternative to modern investors.
With Bolero, this opportunity is becoming a reality: we are giving everyone access to publishing and mastering rights via a transparent and selective platform. Because behind every iconic song lies a revenue stream ready to be activated.
