US Paid Streaming Growth Was Solid During H1 2025 — But Will ‘Free Streaming’ and Vinyl Rebound During the Year’s Second Half?

Yesterday, the RIAA pointed to all-time-high US recorded revenue for H1 2025, which delivered solid paid-listening growth. But do the positive top-level takeaways tell the whole music-market story?

As is so often the case in the industry, the answer might be a matter of perspective and definitely involves a variety of moving parts. Most immediately, the report identified a less than 1% year-over-year revenue improvement in the US for H1 2025, with the overall total having finished at about $5.59 billion.

An important note: The trade organization opted to base the figures on wholesale data, not estimated retail value, this time around. For reference, the old approach initially placed H1 2024 value at $8.68 billion, while the adjusted prior-year sum was restated as $5.54 billion in revenue in the 2025 half-year report.

By category, the methodology pivot hit paid streaming the hardest, but vinyl also sustained a material slip.

On one hand, revenue growth is, of course, revenue growth. On the other hand, a 0.9% boost is less than ideal when considering factors including but certainly not confined to catalog music’s ever-strong performance and the many commercially prominent projects released in the interim.

Regarding other not-great elements of the report: Every category save paid on-demand streaming and non-downloads and -ringtones digital suffered a YoY revenue dip.

Frankly, it would have been a decidedly disconcerting sign (and a bad break from the overall-revenue angle) if Premium had somehow managed to decline. Spotify only upped its prices for existing US subscribers in July 2024 – meaning H1 2025 but not H1 2024 benefited from the bumps.

In total, H1 2025’s $2.89 billion in paid on-demand recorded revenue grew 6.3% YoY, the analysis shows. Meanwhile, ad-supported streaming – now deemed “free streaming” – brought in $875.1 million (down 2.9% YoY) during the year’s opening half, per the resource.

That contraction – the first such opening-half decline registered since at least 2014 and seemingly ever – may well be the report’s most significant takeaway.

Without diving too far into the multifaceted subject here, the decline arrived despite projections of a US ad-spend increase for 2025, continued runaway advertising growth for YouTube, and Spotify’s well-documented advert buildout.

Translation: It’ll be worth closely monitoring the advertising results of Spotify, which saw its global ads head exit following lackluster Q2 results on the freemium side. A replacement hasn’t yet been announced, though some straightforward criticism reached Spotify in the media following the exec’s departure.

The process of achieving renewed growth probably won’t prove as involved for CDs and especially vinyl, the latter of which registered $456.9 million (down 1% YoY) in H1 2025 revenue.

Upcoming releases – chief among them Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, dropping October 3rd – will presumably fuel a full-year rebound. Several exclusive variants are on the way, as is a cassette version, a midnight release at Target, and more.