Gen Z have been raised on streaming services and clearly can’t get enough as an explosion in streams on Spotify hints at record numbers.

Spotify’s new report shows that after over a decade of huge growth, there’s still room for more. Gen Z have had an incredible uptick in streaming, listening to music and podcasts on Spotify 76% more in the first half of 2023 than the first half of 2022.

In the first half of the year, Gen Z streamed over 560 billion songs. That means they’re more on track for a record number of over 1 trillion tracks streamed for the year.

In the last two decades we’ve seen the music industry transform as streaming services have taken the place of physical music and radio. Now, everybody streams. But for Gen Z, they grew up with music streaming services as the number one place for music.

For a generation that music streaming has always been there for, and with platforms like Spotify so established it’s incredible to still see such growth. Spotify see music streaming as vital culture for the younger generations.

In fact, they had in interesting discussion within their report on what culture means for younger generations. They found that 81% of Gen Z don’t see a monoculture amongst their generation; a culture that they subscribe to as an overall group.

However, when asked to name what they thought was the biggest cultural event of the last year they were twice as likely name a song or album drop than a major news event. Gen Z actually point to Spotify specifically as an important part of culture. Spotify found that 79% of Gen Zs in the UK felt that Spotify brings people “deeper into culture”.

18 year old Jack from Newcastle said: “Spotify takes you deep. Say you play one song that you searched for, then the next one comes on; you like the song, you like who it’s made by, and you end up listening to all their music.”

It also looks like AI is lending a helping hand to Gen Z listeners. Gen Zs have streamed more than 1.5 billion minutes of music using Spotify’s AI-powered DJ tool since it launched in February. Their DJ tool is a great example of how AI can be used to enhance music, whilst discussions continue about the potential threat of AI to music artists.