Hey everyone, BigThinnyStatsTano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. Hope you're doing well.

And, today, I thought we would take a bit of a mid-year check-in to look at some interesting numbers and take note of where the music industry sits right now in terms of sales, numbers, consumption trends.

Of course, the numbers I'm going to be addressing throughout this video come by way of some reporting on Luminate. They are a leading entertainment data company.

They had some interesting things to say about where music has been headed in 2026 via a pretty efficient breakdown through Billboard, which we will be looking at now. And I'll give some additional thoughts along the way.

First, let's start off with hip-hop and R&B.

We have been hearing for months and months and months now from media outlets and fans alike that these genres are not hitting in the way that they used to. We're not seeing the same level of chart performance that we were like 10 years ago for these styles of music.

The only hip-hop song in the Top 10 right now is Drake, and numerous tracks from Iceman have been slowly melting off the charts since the release of that album.

But even with hip-hop and R&B not quite having the commercial cache that they did in the 2010s, and how much this narrative we've been seeing, I feel like is kind of suspect and feels like this aggressively negative forced narrative around predominantly black art forms.

These styles of music are still the most dominant when you consider all genres and how they're performing commercially right now.

I mean, as you can see right here, there have been obviously some pretty notable percentage declines in terms of streams and sales over the last several years. But it's not as if hip-hop and R&B have disappeared from popularity completely.

If you wanted to paint a truer, and more accurate, picture of where things stand right now, it's that the genre is more balancing out in terms of popularity with Latin music, and dance and electronic music, and country.

Speaking of which, that is kind of the next note made here by Luminate that dance and electronic music doing really well right now commercially.

And we're seeing this at all levels, not only with the continued popularity of electronic music producers and DJs, but also a growing love and demand for various different styles of dance music and even blends of dance and pop in the underground, which have led to new fandoms, new budding young artists who are making a lot of waves right now.

And hey, even mainstream stars embracing more of a dance direction in their music, albeit sometimes unsuccessfully, Mr. Harry Styles.

But you do have to understand, like some of these moves are being dictated by these artists and their collaborators kind of reading the tea leaves and seeing what's out there and what's popular right now and deciding to jump on top of the wave.

According to these numbers, dance and electronic music is up 18.9% year over year in US on demand audio streams. And look, I'll say personally, I feel like over the last several years, I've been reviewing more of the genre myself, too.

Next, I want to quickly touch down upon rock, a genre that a lot of people feign a lot of concern over its death over the last 10-plus years.

When in actuality, apparently it remains the second most streamed genre in the US behind R&B and hip-hop. Rock is actually super popular. People love rock!

But maybe you wouldn't know it by looking at the charts, because it seems the way a lot of people consume rock music is maybe different than that of pop or hip-hop, where there's almost like a, I would say, like a push toward recency. Because from these numbers, the vast majority of consumption of rock music apparently is older stuff.

Now, when I say that, I don't necessarily mean simply, the classics per se, while those are certainly in the mix. Apparently, the cutoff for these numbers is 60 months, which, yeah, is a sizable chunk of time, but you know, it doesn't mean that people are just listening to rock albums that are 30 or 20 years old.

If anything, I think these numbers kind of speak to the usual consumption trends and habits of rock fans, where a lot of the listeners tend to stick to their favorites and when they really love an album or obsess over it, they tend to go back to it very often for a long time, rather than constantly looking for something new to replace it. Also, over the last few years, we've been seeing a lot of numbers and a lot of information about the increase of physical sales.

People are buying more and more vinyl every year. People are buying more and more CDs every year. Apparently, there's even a CD surge, specifically among Millennials and Gen Z. And I guess a lot of the people who are buying these CDs, new and old, are doing so without even owning a CD player. They're just doing it for the hot, doing it for the bit, apparently.

Throughout all of this growth of physical sales, even with, all the hullabaloo around, Taylor Swift doing all these different variants and so on and so forth, I guess it's actually K-pop fans and groups that are leading the physical sale charge these days, which in concept is pretty cool.

However, I guess like the downside of this is that, a lot of these, distribution deals that these K-pop groups are seeing through their album releases are happening through like websites and big box stores and so on and so forth.

So it's not like, there's any kind of like trickle down effect that we're seeing for indie stores and mom-and-pop record stores as a result of this would be cool if that would change. But at least it's a sign that this new generation of music fans care about something physical, at least.

But also when it comes to physical sales, rock music apparently is not all too far behind.

With Billboard saying between K-pop and indie rock, the latter genre has a larger percentage of overall listeners who are what Luminate calls purchase based super fans at about 40% of fans.

Other interesting trends that are addressed, and maybe this one is a little alarmist, English language music declines in the U.S. from 2025.

I don't know if it's fair to call it a decline as much as it is like a growing popularity of artists from the Latin sphere. K-pop groups, too, obviously.

Bad Bunny has obviously been huge as of late. That man has netted billions of streams over the course of his career, globally, of course, but millions of his fans are based in the U.S. And anytime they're listening to him, that means they're not listening to something in English instead.

And look, this trend of what we're seeing is probably only going to increase over the next 10 years, because the fact that everyone is on the Internet and can stream anything at any time at the click of a button means that there's not necessarily any hard language barrier between you and any artist who's singing in any language, really.

I mean, as big as these numbers seem right now, I feel like we're seeing the seeds sprouting of what will eventually become a totally different music paradigm come the 2030s, where, who knows, maybe the growing trends of music consumption won't be based around Spanish language music and Korean music. Maybe it'll be French music.

I guess in the last few years, we've also seen some breakout stars coming out of the U.K., too. Not just cultural pop game changers such as Charli XCX, but people like Olivia Dean, who just can't seem to get off the charts right now.

And, sadly, AI music continues to gain ground, as well. But who the hell knows where that's going to go? Definitely a disease that I wish there was a cure for right now. But fingers crossed that something will happen on that front in 2027.

But, yeah, those are some really interesting music trends and numbers that are prevailing at the moment.

And let me know in the comments what of these were kind of surprising to you, or you sort of expected, or ones that you even find yourself in the midst of.

Because I'll say from my own personal experience in terms of like what I'm reviewing, what I'm listening to casually, and what I'm purchasing when I go into the record store. I see myself too in a lot of these numbers, as well.

That'll be it. Anthony Fantano. Music numbers. Luminate. Forever.