The 2026 global music map: Latin America +17.1%, MENA and sub-Saharan Africa +15.2%, the US +3.5%

IFPI published its Global Music Report 2026 on 18 Mar 2026. Recorded music revenue grew 6.4% in 2025 to US$31.7bn, the 11th year of growth in a row. According to the State of the Industry report, this is the first time the total has passed $30bn, and growth was faster than the 4.7% IFPI now gives for 2024. Every region grew for the sixth year running, and 57 of the 58 markets IFPI measures grew.

The headline map looks like a story about the Global South. Read it in dollars as well as percentages and it gets more complicated.

Where did revenue grow fastest?

IFPI's regional figures for 2025:

• Latin America: +17.1%, the fastest region and its 16th straight year of growth. Streaming made up 88.1% of revenue there. Brazil grew 14.1% and moved up to eighth in the world. Mexico grew 13.3% and joined the top 10 at tenth, overtaking Italy and Australia.
• Middle East and North Africa: +15.2%, joint second fastest. Streaming made up 97.5% of revenue.
• Sub-Saharan Africa: +15.2%, to US$120m. South Africa made up 78.1% of the region and grew 12.9%.
• Asia: +10.9%. Japan, the second-largest market, grew 8.9%. China grew 20.1%, overtook Germany as the fourth-largest market and was the fastest grower in the top 20.
• Europe: +5.6%, adding more than US$500m and holding 30.4% of global revenue.
• USA and Canada: +3.5%, adding more than US$400m and holding 38.7% of global revenue. The US alone grew 3.3%.
• Australasia: +1.5%, to US$623m.

Is growth in the fast regions speeding up?

No, it slowed. In IFPI's report a year earlier, covering 2024, the Middle East and North Africa grew 22.8%, sub-Saharan Africa 22.6% and Latin America 22.5%. All three are still in double digits, but each fell back by five to eight points in 2025. Meanwhile the big, mature regions sped up: USA and Canada went from 2.1% to 3.5%, and Asia from 1.3% to 10.9%.

One caution: IFPI revises past years as data comes in (it put sub-Saharan Africa at US$110m for 2024 last year), so we are comparing the headline rates each report published, not a single revised series. The direction is still clear. The global total grew faster in 2025 because the largest markets grew faster, not because the emerging ones did.

How much money is that in dollars?

This is where the map changes. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole brought in US$120m in 2025. If that figure is 15.2% above 2024, the region added roughly $16m in a year. That is our own arithmetic from IFPI's numbers, not a figure IFPI publishes. USA and Canada, growing at a "slow" 3.5%, added more than $400m: more than three times the entire sub-Saharan African market, and more than 20 times its growth.

IFPI hints at this itself. Dennis Kooker, president of global digital business at Sony Music, says in the report that new subscriber growth "will come from markets that historically haven't been a big part of the global story". That is a forecast about the future, not a description of where the revenue is today.

What does this mean for independent artists?

Spotify's Loud & Clear data for 2025 is useful next to IFPI's map, because it is measured per artist rather than per region. Spotify says:

• Artists two years after their debut already earn more than half their royalties from outside their home country, on average.
• 85% of artists who crossed $100,000 in Spotify royalties in 2025 are based outside the US.
• Roughly half of Spotify royalties were generated by independent artists and labels.
• Among genres generating more than $50m in royalties, some of the fastest growing in 2025 were Brazilian funk (+36%), K-pop (+31%), trap latino (+29%), urban latino (+27%) and reggaeton (+24%).

Put the two datasets together and the practical lesson for a self-releasing artist is this: your audience can be anywhere, but your income depends on which countries your listeners are in. A thousand new fans in a high-growth, low-revenue market are worth having. They just don't pay the same as a thousand in Germany or Canada, so they can't be the whole plan.

What we think

Percentages are a marketing story; dollars are a business story. "Africa +15.2%" will appear on a lot of conference slides this year. For an artist deciding where to spend a small promo budget, the better reading is that fast-growing regions are where fan bases are cheapest to build now, while mature markets still pay most of the bills. Our view: build audience where you can do it cheaply, keep an eye on where your streams are actually earning, and treat a region's growth rate as a sign of the future, not as income.

The slowdown is a warning against hype cycles. Growth in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa fell from about 22% to 15–17% in a single year. That is still strong growth, but anyone selling "emerging market" distribution or promo packages on the strength of last year's numbers is selling an out-of-date chart.

These markets run almost entirely on streaming, so platform rules matter more there. Streaming is 97.5% of revenue in the Middle East and North Africa and 88.1% in Latin America. Where there's little physical, sync or download income to fall back on, a platform's payout thresholds, fraud filters and recommendation rules effectively decide who gets paid. Artists from these regions have the most to lose when those systems misfire, and the least leverage to get them fixed.

Read the report for what it is. The report's own headline says revenues grew "as record companies drive innovation", and it credits label investment for the growth. The three regional case studies it highlights are all major labels: Sony in Spain and Portugal, Warner in Mexico and Universal in Southeast Asia. That is a fair account of what the majors are doing. It is not the full picture when Spotify says independents generate roughly half its royalties. The majors are building local teams in these markets because that's where future subscribers will come from. Independent artists get there first more often than the report suggests, and should negotiate as if they know that.

Who wins and who loses. Winners are artists and labels with real local fan bases in markets that are turning free listeners into paying subscribers. IFPI notes, for example, that paid streaming reaches only just over 20% of households in Spain and Portugal, so there is room to grow. Losers are anyone who confuses a high growth rate with a large payday, and artists in markets where almost all income passes through a few platforms whose rules they can't influence.