Nearly two decades into the streaming era, recorded music keeps reaching new heights and inspiring more fans.
New data RIAA released today shows that in 2023 overall recorded music revenues grew another 8% to an all-time high of $17.1 billion. That is the highest topline revenue number we have ever reported and marks eight consecutive years of growth. Adjusting for inflation, we’ve recovered about half of the value lost during the Napster era, demonstrating plenty of room to reach even higher as we continue forward.
Paid streaming subscriptions continue to power music. Revenues are up 9% and subscriptions are up 5.7%, reaching 96.8 million — another all-time record. Labels’ “all of the above” commitment to meet fans everywhere they want to be continues to pay off for the entire music community. Licensing of social networks, fitness apps, and short form video are adding new value, ad-supported streaming showed enduring growth, and physical sales once again boomed, with vinyl records delivering yet another a double digit increase.
For artists, songwriters, and fans, this strong and sustained growth signals a time of incredible opportunity — with new formats, styles, and sounds rising up across innovative platforms and emerging ways to listen. As new services continue to get fully licensed at rates reflecting music’s incredible value, revenue for artists and songwriters will only continue to grow.
Americans’ deepening connection to music shows up all across the culture. The last year has seen record touring revenues, blockbuster concert films, and showstopping moments bringing communities together from a universally lauded Super Bowl halftime show to a must-see GRAMMYs broadcast that reached its largest audience in half a decade.
The engagement is also reflected in RIAA’s Gold & Platinum program, where historic milestones in the last year alone included the 100th Diamond single and the first ever “Double Diamond” for a track that hit 10 million sales/streaming thresholds two times over. Our massive “Class Of” 2023 was our biggest yet, celebrating 57 Gold & Platinum “first-timers” — artists receiving their first certification for recently released music.
But as music continues to soar and bring Americans together in new ways, new challenges continue to emerge — led by the mushrooming threat of generative artificial intelligence that, absent thoughtful and effective guardrails, put this dynamic growth and cultural reach at risk.
Generative AI, of course, has incredible promise and no one has moved more quickly than the music industry to embrace responsible uses of this technology to create new possibilities and push human artistry forward.
But generative AI also needs clear rules of the road and effective guardrails against a range of potential abuses — from invasive misappropriation of artists’ recordings and images for nonconsensual deepfakes and voice clones to the widescale unlicensed scraping and stealing of copyrighted works on which most generative AI models have been built.
RIAA — and 180 partner organizations in the Human Artistry Campaign — have been working tirelessly over the past year to put in place real and meaningful protections for every person’s voice and likeness while also debunking legally unsound claims by AI developers that they can use copyrighted recordings and compositions without permission or pay under wildly overreaching notions of fair use.
And we are seeing results in concrete protections for artists and the general public from AI overreach in efforts such as Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, a first-in-the-nation law establishing every person’s right to protect their voice and likeness from unauthorized digital deepfakes. Congress too has been active developing federal bipartisan proposals like the NO FAKES proposal led by Senators Coons and Blackburn, and the No AI FRAUD Act led by Representatives Salazar and Dean. We are grateful to these leaders and their many cosponsors and colleagues for working together across party lines to protect individual humanity in the age of generative AI.
Support Major AI Bill, the ELVIS Act. Photo by Getty Images for the Recording Academy®
Used responsibly, generative AI tools can take human creativity to new places. But irresponsibly, it could stifle a generation of artists across all mediums.
RIAA and our members are committed to staying on the field every day, fighting with the music community for a pro-human, pro-creator future. Artists, songwriters, and their fans deserve nothing less.
Mitch Glazier, Chairman and CEO, RIAA
