Luminate 2026 Midyear Report: Music, Film, and TV Data

Luminate, the data company behind the Billboard charts, released its 2026 Midyear Report on July 15, and the numbers tell a story of an entertainment industry that is growing in every direction at once. The full report is available on Luminate's blog, and Billboard published a detailed breakdown of the key findings. Global on-demand audio streaming reached 2.8 trillion streams in the first half of 2026, up 9.8 percent year over year. The report is the first to combine music, film, and television data under one cover, and the findings show that the walls between those sectors are crumbling faster than anyone expected.

Streaming Growth Accelerates Globally

Global on-demand audio streams grew 9.8 percent in H1 2026 to 2.8 trillion, a slight acceleration from the 9.6 percent full-year growth rate in 2025. The international markets are driving much of that momentum. Ex-U.S. on-demand audio streams grew 11.8 percent to 2.0 trillion, compared to a 4.8 percent increase in the U.S. market, which reached 732.7 billion streams.

Rob Jonas, CEO of Luminate, said in the report's release that the decision to combine music with film and television was straightforward. "The music industry wants a clearer read on streaming television and theatrical performance; film and television companies are asking for the reverse," Jonas said.

The acceleration in international markets signals a structural shift. Latin, K-pop, and UK artists are capturing larger shares of U.S. streaming, while U.S. artists still command over two-thirds of domestic streams.

The CD Comeback That Nobody Saw Coming

One of the most surprising findings in the report is the CD resurgence. U.S. CD sales surged 16 percent to 16.3 million units in the first half of 2026, vastly outpacing vinyl's 2.4 percent growth. That is a nearly 7-to-1 ratio in favor of CDs.

BTS' latest album ARIRANG was a major driver, and K-pop fandoms from ATEEZ and ENHYPEN also contributed heavily to the surge. But even after removing K-pop from the numbers, U.S. CD sales still grew 6.7 percent.

The buyers are changing the meaning of the format. Approximately half of Gen Z and Millennial CD buyers do not own a CD player. The purchase is about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist, not just playback. Big box retailers like Walmart and Target are seeing the most uplift, likely due to in-store exclusives, while independent retailers fell from a 36.6 percent share of physical sales in 2025 to 32.1 percent in 2026.

Genre Wars: R&B Loses Ground, Dance Rises

R&B and hip-hop still command roughly one in every four U.S. audio streams, but its dominance has been declining for years. The genre's share of Billboard 200 album-equivalent consumption fell to 30 percent in H1 2026, down sharply from 41 percent in the first half of 2023. That is the sharpest decline since 2023, according to Luminate.

Dance and electronic music ended H1 2026 as the U.S. largest growth genre by ODA share point change, up 0.51 points. The genre grew 18.9 percent year over year in U.S. streams, led by current acts like John Summit and Disco Lines. A viral nostalgia trend also drove songs from 2015 to 2017 back into the spotlight. Half of the top 10 dance and electronic songs in the first half of the year were from that 2015 to 2017 period, including The Chainsmokers featuring Halsey's "Closer."

World music grew 11.9 percent year over year and leads all genres in current listening. Thirty-four percent of world music streams come from tracks that are 0 to 18 months old, compared to 26.5 percent from tracks 18 to 60 months old.

Rock, meanwhile, is dominated by nostalgia. Deep catalog activity now accounts for 75 percent of all rock audio streaming, up 5 percentage points from last year. Most rock listeners are not streaming current releases. Noah Kahan's The Great Divide earned 1.35 million total equivalent album sales and stands as one of the few current rock hits of the year.

Language Diversity Reshapes the U.S. Market

English-language streaming in the U.S. fell to a historic low of 87.1 percent in H1 2026, down from 88.1 percent in 2025. Nearly one in ten streams (9.4 percent) in the U.S. were now in Spanish, a figure that benefited significantly from Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show performance earlier this year.

Latin music's casual listener base in the U.S. climbed to a peak of 54 percent in Q1 2026, up from 44 percent in Q3 2021. Korean-language music held steady at 1.1 percent of U.S. streaming, remaining the third most popular language for music in America.

South Korea rose to third place in Luminate's Export Power Rankings, driven by BTS and the wider K-pop catalogue. Brazil climbed to eighth place on the strength of Alok and Anitta, its second consecutive rise. The U.K. grew its U.S. streaming share by 0.8 percentage points to 7.8 percent, with artists like Olivia Dean and Charli XCX leading the charge.

AI Music Gains Traction, but Remains Niche

Fifty-four percent of U.S. musicians show positive feelings and acceptance toward generative AI tools in music, compared to 35 percent of non-musicians. Eighteen percent of U.S. musicians report using AI to edit or remix existing music, three times the 6 percent rate among non-musicians.

The highest-ranking AI-assisted song globally is Chill77, Unjaps, and Mikeeysmind's "Papaoutai (Afro Soul)," a remix of Stromae's track, which reached 210.7 million global audio streams in weeks 1 through 24 of 2026. In the U.S., the top AI-generated track is Breaking Rust's "Livin' on Borrowed Time," which accumulated 19 million domestic streams and 13.4 million streams outside the U.S.

Jaime Marconette, VP of Music Insights at Luminate, noted that while AI tools are actively transforming creative and production workflows, individual AI-generated tracks have yet to make a profound, long-term impact on consumption behavior.

Streaming TV and Film: Libraries Outpace Originals

On the television and film side, the data reveals a different pattern. Netflix holds 57 percent of U.S. original content viewing time, but its share slipped year over year as Prime Video and HBO Max made gains. Total U.S. original content hours streamed declined slightly from H1 2025 but remained well ahead of 2023 and 2024 levels.

The bigger story is library content. Major streaming platforms collectively offer around 19,000 catalogue titles compared with roughly 7,000 originals. TV viewers estimate spending nearly 60 percent of their at-home viewing time on content more than one year old, while only 43 percent of viewing goes to new content shortly after release.

U.S. TV premieres fell to 517 in the first half of 2026, down from 930 in 2022. SVOD series volume posted a 12 percent decline. HBO Max's "The Pitt" led all original SVOD series by a wide margin, but two CBS broadcast titles, "Marshals" and "Tracker," surpassed "The Pitt" Season 2 in minutes watched during the first half of 2026.

Streaming original films accounted for seven of the top 10 most-streamed titles in H1 2026, reversing years of theatrical dominance on SVOD. Meanwhile, younger audiences are returning to cinemas. Nearly 70 percent of both Gen Z and Millennial movie watchers reported seeing two or more films in theaters within three months.

The documentary format is emerging as a bridge between screens. Luminate cited The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, whose Netflix debut triggered an 11 percent increase in the band's U.S. music streams and an 8 percent global rise during the week of release.

What This Means for Entertainment

The Luminate 2026 Midyear Report paints a picture of an industry in structural realignment. Streaming is expanding, but not uniformly. Physical sales are surging in unexpected formats. Genre dominance is shifting. Language diversity is reshaping the U.S. market. And the boundaries between music, film, and television are dissolving into a single entertainment ecosystem.

The data suggests that audience behavior across all three sectors defies easy assumptions. The winners are not the ones betting on a single playbook. They are the ones building across screens, formats, and borders.

For artists and labels, the message is clear. Superfans who both pay and participate are the most valuable segment. Twenty percent of U.S. music listeners qualify as superfans, and 11 percent represent the ultimate overlap of purchase-based and engagement-based fans. Those fans drive physical sales, sustain streaming numbers, and amplify content across platforms.