The state of Germany’s music streaming industry in 2023
Image credit: S. Widua
Looking back at an extraordinary year for music reveals how German listeners are listening more than ever as they take to streaming.
Germany have the fourth-largest recorded music market in the world. As such, it matters how Germans are listening to music. Let’s start off with the big news: 2023 was a good year for music in Germany.
BVMI, representatives of the German music industry, have released their annual report for 2023. The headline news is that music streams grew by 12%, with songs being streamed nearly 213 billion times in the country last year.
Germany was reportedly slow to get up on music streaming. Since they’ve adopted the new platform wholeheartedly, the total streams generated have nearly doubled within five years. There were 108 billion total streams across Germany in 2019.
Managing Director of GfK, Dr. Mathias Giloth wrote: “Music streaming via the various platforms has become firmly established in people’s everyday lives, is continuing to soar, and has even grown somewhat more strongly in 2023 than in the previous year.”
Germany’s 12% growth trails only slightly behind the UK, who saw 12.8% growth in music streams last year. The UK is just ahead of Germany as the third largest recorded music market in the world. Japan is in second place and the United States takes the top spot.
What is Germany listening to?
The report finds that Germany is particularly keen on the latest tunes. Over half of the streams generated last year came from music released in the 2020s. Only 10% of the music listened to in Germany last year came from music released before 2000.
German music and German-language music is finding success in the country. 9 out of the 10 most-streamed artists with releases from this decade were German-speaking artists. BVMI hailed Ayliva, Luciano, and Nina Chuba as “particularly well received”.
BVMI CEO, Dr. Florian Drücke says that there is still a disparity between the success of German music on streaming and the plays of German-language tracks on radio stations. He says: “Many radio stations continue to have to ask themselves why German-language titles are not played to a similar extent.”
He goes on to celebrate streaming’s influence on music in Germany, saying: “Audio streaming has deepened our relationship with music. Thanks to time and location-independent access, it potentially shapes every situation in our lives, which is underlined by the significant increase in the number of measured streams to now 213 billion.”
He adds that there were only four German-language titles in the Top 100 Airplay Charts last year.
According to SimilarWeb, Spotify is the most popular music streaming service in Germany.