S11.4 · Media, Entertainment & Creative
Recorded music revenue reached $31.7B in 2025 as AI erodes production-services value while catalogue rights hold.
Global recorded music revenue reached $31.7B in 2025, up 6.4% year over year, on 837M paid streaming subscribers worldwide (IFPI Global Music Report 2026). The headline is healthy; the composition matters more. Publishing and live revenue are now outpacing recorded music, and generative AI is starting to erode the production-services layer that has traditionally sat between artists and the market — while catalogue rights, the assets that actually compound, remain largely untouched.
The US accounts for roughly 40% of global recorded music revenue; the fastest growth comes from APAC, Latin America and MENA. Universal, Sony and Warner Music together control an estimated 65-70% of recorded music revenue, with DIY distribution platforms such as DistroKid and TuneCore growing the independent long tail beneath them. Recorded music overall is growing at roughly 6-7% annually — now trailing publishing and live, which says less about the health of the artist ecosystem than about where within it the money is being made.
Songwriters and artists sit upstream, labels handling A&R, marketing and rights administration in the middle, digital service providers and live promoters downstream. As in every rights-based segment, position sets the multiple. Master and publishing catalogues are annuity assets that trade at high multiples in dedicated royalty-fund markets; the label functions around A&R, marketing and distribution are a comparatively lower-multiple services business. Streaming maturity widens that split — the catalogue side keeps compounding on existing rights largely independent of how many new subscribers a platform adds in a given year, while the services side stays directly exposed to how much labels continue to invest in developing new artists.
Label extensions into touring and merchandise economics and into sync licensing across film, television, games and advertising do two jobs at once: they defend against royalty-rate compression, and they capture adjacent revenue the catalogue itself does not reach.
AI is collapsing the cost of demo production, mixing, mastering and session-musician work, and the moat under direct pressure is A&R gatekeeping. When artists can self-produce distributable, release-ready masters without a label's production infrastructure, the production-services value labels have historically sold is disintermediated. The catalogue-rights business — the actual annuity asset — holds its value through this; it is the services wrapper around it that is being repriced.
A distinct licensing category is also forming around fully AI-generated "synthetic artist" music, which sits outside the human-performance catalogue model that has defined recorded-music rights to date. Neither dynamic is speculative. Both are already underway.