The Record Business Can Grow While a Music Scene Goes Hungry

The IFPI’s 2026 report describes growth in global recorded music revenue in 2025, with paid subscription streaming accounting for just over half of that revenue. A person can be pleased by that figure and still need more information before describing life as a musician. The figure tells us what a particular part of the business earned. It gives little direct guidance about the prospects of a pianist who wants an affordable late rehearsal in Hong Kong. IFPI Global Music Report 2026.

I care about a difference between being able to circulate a recording and being able to become the kind of musician who can make another. The second possibility uses rehearsal, criticism and the patience other people have for an uncertain project. Sometimes the income from the first helps buy those things. A listener who found a song on a subscription service can buy a ticket or put an artist in touch with someone they need. That is a good account of a connection. The existence of the connection cannot tell us how often it occurs or what the people involved can afford to do between occasions.

What needs to happen twice

Take a band that finds twenty listeners. For a year it needs places to play twice, an affordable way to travel and time to change a set. A fourth musician might discover the band while playing an entirely different sort of show. Those connections can improve the work before a recording is ready. An economy that prices every small occurrence as a separate event makes this development hard to finance. At scale the recording may look like the beginning of a market. For the musicians it is a late trace of one.

Hong Kong already has project funding that can support performances and creation. Public programmes make decisions about the relationship between presentation and development when they choose what a project can contain. Open auditions and neighbourhood bills make some of the same decisions with considerably less money. I would judge any of them partly by whether new musicians acquire a way to return. The headline audience from one date can be a difficult figure to interpret without that information. Hong Kong Arts Development Council Project Grant.

Recorded growth can pay for real new possibilities. It can also give observers a large reassuring number that stands beside a small practical failure they have no interest in measuring. I would resist the habit of using the first to settle the second. An industry can keep making room for a bigger return on a song while the musicians nearest to us struggle to find out what they could become together.