Goldman Sachs Raises Music Growth Forecast for the First Time in Three Years
Goldman Sachs has raised its growth forecast for parts of the music industry, the first upgrade of its kind in three years. The bank set out the change in its 2026 "Music in the Air" report, which Billboard reported on 21 October 2026.
The report's headline figure is for 2025. The global recorded music market grew 6.4% to $31.7 billion, measured in constant currency, a method that strips out swings in exchange rates. That beat Goldman Sachs' earlier expectations by 60 basis points, where one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point.
Streaming grew 7.7% in 2025, slightly ahead of the 7.4% the analysts had expected. Paid subscription streaming grew 8.8%, just short of the 9.0% forecast. The bank blamed that gap on streaming companies chasing listeners in emerging markets, where each user brings in less money, and on discounted and bundled plans.
Physical sales were the surprise. They rose 8% against an expected 1.4%, and vinyl demand climbed nearly 14%. Records, in other words, are selling faster than most forecasters had predicted.
Not every area did well. Synch revenue, the fees paid to put songs into films, television shows and adverts, fell 2.0% when growth of 6.0% had been expected. Performance rights, the royalties collected when songs are played in public or on broadcast, rose only 0.3% against an expected 6.0%. Goldman Sachs partly put that down to a slower-than-expected recovery from the 2023 Hollywood writers' strike.
Looking ahead, the bank expects growth to come from more frequent subscription price increases, live events, and retail sales of physical records, downloads, other digital formats and synch. It also expects ad-supported streaming revenue, the free tier paid for by advertising, to slow by 1% to 3%. Global music retail revenue is forecast to grow 6.7% in 2026. Over the longer run, the bank projects a compound annual growth rate of 5.8% from 2025 to 2035. A compound annual growth rate is the average yearly growth over a period, with each year's gains building on the last.
For rights holders, the companies that own recordings and songs, Goldman Sachs expects recorded music revenue to grow at a 5.9% compound rate over the coming decade. Digital Music News reported the bank's projection that recorded music revenue will reach $56.1 billion by 2035. Earlier trade coverage, published on 15 October, said the bank had raised its 2026 recorded-music revenue forecast by 1.2%, as Hits Daily Double reported.
Behind these figures are the people who earn from them: songwriters collecting licence fees, session players paid for recordings, and the shops that still sell records to customers who want to hold them. A forecast is only a forecast, and the bank's numbers can change as the year goes on. For now, the message from the report is that the money is moving, and the bank expects it to keep moving upwards.
