IMS Business Report 2024: Independent labels increased market share

The IMS Business Report of 2024 shows that independent labels have increased their market share

The International Music Summit (IMS) Report 2024 has recently been published. This is a study, which shows what the industry looks like now and how it breaks down in numbers. There’s a lot of interesting and surprising information in this year’s report that’s not to be missed. Amongst other things, we learn from the Mark Mulligan-led production that Spotify has not only maintained its global position among DSPs, but has also increased its market share to almost 32%. But it’s not just Spotify that is the absolute winner in terms of market share race, but also the independent labels.

This year’s IMS Business Report shows that the industry has seen very strong revenue growth. While not yet at the same level of growth as after the pandemic lockdown, the statistics are still outstanding. This exponential growth is not even questionable, previously a forecast had predicted that by 2030 these figures could rise to $87.1 billion. As mentioned earlier, Spotify has maintained its position and even grown, and the same is the situation for independent record labels.

The growth in the market share of independent record labels is truly outstanding. The IMS report shows that by the last quarter of 2023, the share of these labels in the global market had jumped to 31%. Although the major labels have also simply doubled their revenues from streaming publishing, for small and/or independent publishers, still, this is a great percentage. While there are winners and losers in everything, it was perhaps the self-releasing artists who suffered the biggest market share drop due to the many royalty changes last year. The latter is also revealed in the IMS Business Report 2024 research, which provides more information on the current state of the industry.