Goldman Bumps Its 2024 Music Sales Forecast — With a Nearly $164 Billion Global Market Expected for 2030

In its latest Music in the Air report, Goldman increased its 2024 revenue forecast and elevated its 2030 outlook to almost $164 billion. Photo Credit: Goldman Sachs

Citing the revenue momentum of publishing, concerts, and streaming in emerging markets, Goldman Sachs has bumped its music sales forecast for 2024. Goldman just recently disclosed this updated 2024 outlook as part of its Music in the Air report. Featuring a number of interesting data points and adjacent takeaways, that analysis spans 75 pages, with its “redacted version” running 48 pages in its own right.

Zeroing in on key components of the voluminous resource, Goldman is banking on 7.6% across-the-board music sales growth, referring to publishing, recorded, and live alike. Previously, that percentage was 7.4%; the Fever investor is also anticipating a 7.9% 2024 spike in gross revenue, according to the report.

Elaborating on those points, Goldman explored the initially mentioned “main drivers” of the surge, emphasizing the calculated 25% year-over-year growth achieved by the overarching live concerts sphere (where Live Nation sees “another record year” in 2024) during 2023.

Publishing’s expected 9.2% revenue expansion between 2024 and 2025 – Warner Music this week posted double-digit Q1 2024 publishing growth – is contributing to the more optimistic stance as well, the NTWRK stakeholder communicated.

Digging into the most noteworthy of the figures behind the percentages, Music in the Air acknowledges a slower-than-expected recorded growth rate (8.9% instead of 9.3%) for 2024. Across all categories and sub-categories, ad-supported streaming laid claim to the largest gross-revenue-forecast decrease at 9.1% growth (down from an even 18%).

However, that dip would be offset by the above-highlighted accelerated revenue buildouts in publishing (9.2% instead of 8.5%) and live (6% instead of 5%). At the intersection of those percentages and streaming’s comparatively rapid growth in emerging markets (where ads generate less revenue in general and paid plans cost less), Music in the Air, running with IFPI revenue data and Luminate’s streaming-volume calculations, further recognizes the per-stream royalty rate’s continued decline in recent years.

Lastly, on the physical front, Goldman, which has for some time touted the perceived monetization potential of superfans, retooled its 2024 expectations for the category. That upward swing (3.1% forecasted growth instead of a 2.6% slip) is due in part to diehard supporters’ buying habits, which commercially prominent artists are capitalizing upon.

Bigger picture, the slightly more optimistic outlook for 2024 has been accompanied by bolstered revenue forecasts for 2025 and beyond – ultimately leading to an astonishing $163.7 billion global music space (in gross revenue) in 2030. Should the necessary expansions and then the prediction come to fruition (there are, of course, an abundance of unknowns in music and the wider market), the industry would be relatively close to twice as large as it was in 2023, the report shows.