• European cultural & creative sectors account for 4,4% of EU GDP and 7.6 million full-time jobs.
• The European music sector specifically is supporting 2 million jobs, contributing €81.9 billion in gross value added to GDP, and exporting €9.7 billion worth of goods and services to countries outside the EU27 and UK.
• Europe generates nearly a third of total recorded music revenues worldwide.
• Europe’s share of the global recorded music market was 27.7% in 2022, with a total of $7,3bn revenues – a growth of 7.54% year on year, marking the fourth consecutive year for growth in the region. This is far below the 15.7% growth recorded in 2021, which was exceptional as the market recovered from the impact of Covid-19. But 2022 remained a strong performance overall. Set in a 5-year context, it was even one of the best years for European growth.
• Streaming revenue in Europe grew by 11.9% in 2022 to $4.6bn, representing 62.9% of the total European recorded music market.
• Ad-supported video streaming revenues grew by 14.6% to reach $471.m, their highest level ever.
• Performing rights revenues increased by 11% to a total of $1.4bn in 2022 – 18.7% of total European revenues. Europe remained the top region for performance rights revenues, accounting for over 70.2% of the world’s performance rights income in 2022.
  
• In Europe, physical revenues declined by 9.9% to amount to $1.08bn as revenues failed to match those recorded in 2021 which saw an exceptional performance due to recovery from the pandemic and shop closures. Vinyl however, continued to show double-digit growth and accounted for more than 50% of physical revenues in 2022.
• In 2021, Europe represented around a quarter of all users of subscription services globally.
• Copyright-intensive sectors account for 9.9 million EU jobs.
• Copyright-intensive industries make a positive contribution to the EU’s trade balance: net export of €15bn.

Music industry

• In 2022, global recorded music revenues totalled $26.2 billion. An increase of 9% compared to 2021 ($25.9bn).
• The music industry’s digital revenues (including streaming) now represent 70.6% of total revenues (2022).
• Streaming revenues specifically grew by 11.5% (year-on-year) to represent 67% of the total market (2022) – $17.5bn.
• Subscription streaming increased by 10.3% to represent this year again the bulk of total streaming revenues 68.8% – $12.7bn), while ad-supported streams and video streaming revenues also increased by 18.7% (up to $2.9bn) and 11.3% (up to $2bn) respectively (year-on-year change). The growth in ad-supported audio and video streaming revenues was helped by a revenue growth in global social media platforms by 30.9% (e.g. TikTok, Facebook, Instgram), but revenues from video stream continue to represent the smallest revenue stream across all streaming revenues by sub-format.
• In 2021, streaming revenue alone exceeded total industry revenue in each year from 2009 to 2016. Over 50,000 artists generated $10,000 from Spotify alone — and likely over $40,000 across all recorded revenue sources, meaning that more and more artists are able to reach this milestone, and they are not coming necessarily from the top music markets. 34% of them live in countries outside the IFPI’s top ten music markets (Australia, Canada, China, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S.). In addition, on Spotify in 2021, only 12% of U.S. streams were of the top 50 artists.
  
• Number of users of paid subscription accounts grew by 12.6% to 589 million in 2022 (523 million in 2021),.
• Streaming aside however, digital revenues saw a drop of 11.7% this year, accounting for $644.4m.
• Synchronisation revenues increased over 22.3%, accounting for $640.4m and representing 2% of total revenues.
• Performance rights revenues grew by 8.64% to a total of $2.54bn, representing 9.4% of total revenues.
• Physical sales increased for the second year running by 4% to reach $4.6bn in 2022, although this did not replicate the prior year’s growth of 16.1% caused by a post-pandemic resurgence. They represented this year 17.5% of total revenues. Vinyl sales were up $200m this year (17.1% growth) to reach $1.54bn.
• 50% of top tracks played on radio and downloaded in Europe are American.
• Record companies invested $4.5 bn in research and development and marketing in 2015, representing 27% of these companies’ revenues.
• As a whole, the music industry invested 16.9% of its revenue in research and development for new artists in 2015. It is higher than other research-intensive industries (e.g. pharmaceuticals and biotechnology 14.4%, software and computer services 10.1%, aerospace and defence 4.5%, etc.).
• IPR‐intensive industries pay significantly higher wages than other industries, with a wage premium of more than 40%, with copyright-intensive sectors having the highest premium (69%).

Digital services and social media

• There are more than 230 digital music services available across the EU, providing access to more than 40 million tracks.
• 6 of the top 10 most liked people on Facebook are music artists (updated: June 2016).
• 7 of the top 10 most followed people on Twitter are music artists (updated: June 2016).
• 9 of the top 10 most watched videos of all time on YouTube are music videos. Out of the top 20, 18 are music videos (updated: June 2016).

The value gap