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Taylor Swift accounted for 1.79% of the U.S. music market in 2023—about one in every 78 U.S. on-demand audio streams—while streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts fell 7.1% year over year. But hip-hop did not disappear: it still represented 25.5% of U.S. music consumption, and catalog streams for R&B and hip-hop rose 11.3%. The figures describe different parts of the market, not a single genre-wide collapse.
What the 2023 U.S. figures show
Luminate’s year-end figures, summarized by the Associated Press on January 10, 2024, put Swift’s U.S. market share at 1.79%. The report summary also expressed that presence as one in every 78 U.S. on-demand audio streams. These are measures of her share of U.S. listening, not her share of every kind of music revenue or a global streaming total.
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The same account says streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts declined 7.1% from 2022. That measure concerns current acts, rather than all recordings associated with the genres. The AP’s summary says hip-hop still made up 25.5% of overall U.S. music consumption in 2023, the largest genre share reported there.
Why “hip-hop nosedived” needs qualification
Current acts lost streaming volume
The 7.1% drop is a year-over-year change in streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts. It does not, on its own, show that hip-hop’s entire audience, all hip-hop listening, or every artist in the genre declined by that amount.
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Catalog listening grew
Catalog streams for R&B and hip-hop increased 11.3%, according to the AP’s summary of Luminate’s figures. Current-act and catalog trends therefore moved in opposite directions. A single headline about the genre obscures that split.
The genre remained large
Hip-hop’s 25.5% share of overall U.S. music consumption is a measure of scale, not annual growth. Read alongside the current-act decline, it indicates that hip-hop remained a major part of U.S. listening even as streams for newer releases and current acts fell.
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Spotify’s rankings tell a different, platform-specific story
Spotify named Swift its top global artist for 2023 and said she had accumulated more than 26.1 billion global streams since January 1. Its November 29 Wrapped announcement does not specify an exact end cutoff for that count in the passage reviewed, so it should not be treated as directly interchangeable with Luminate’s full-year U.S. market-share figure.
Spotify’s global artist top five were Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd, Drake, and Peso Pluma. Its global album top five were Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, Swift’s Midnights, SZA’s SOS, The Weeknd’s Starboy, and KAROL G’s MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO. On Spotify’s U.S. album ranking, Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time led, followed by SZA’s SOS and Swift’s Midnights. These are Spotify rankings, not rankings of the entire music industry.
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How to read the numbers without mixing them up
- Geography: Swift’s 1.79% share and hip-hop’s 25.5% consumption share refer to the U.S.; Spotify’s artist count and global rankings are global.
- Metric: Market share, stream volume, genre share, and a platform ranking answer different questions.
- Category: The 7.1% decrease concerns streams for current R&B and hip-hop acts; the 11.3% increase concerns catalog streams for those genres.
- Source and time window: Luminate’s year-end report and Spotify’s November 29 Wrapped announcement are separate accounts with different scopes. Luminate says its report includes country-level streaming data for 50 global markets; its charts were presented by Billboard, its exclusive chart partner. The interactive report requires visitor details to access its full contents.
There is also a wider streaming backdrop: the AP reported that global music streams exceeded 4 trillion in 2023, citing Luminate. That global total supplies context for the scale of listening, but it does not explain the U.S. genre changes by itself.
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