The global electronic music industry was worth $15.1 billion in 2025, according to the IMS Business Report — now in its twelfth annual edition, produced by MIDiA Research and presented every year at IMS Ibiza. That’s a 7% jump year-over-year, and the number that makes it a genuinely interesting figure isn’t the total, it’s the shape of the growth curve behind it: 2025’s 7% is actually an acceleration, after 2024’s growth had slowed to 6% from the 9% rate the year before that. The industry didn’t just keep growing — it sped back up after a year of catching its breath.
Where the growth is actually coming from
The report’s most striking line item isn’t the streaming numbers — for the first time in 2025, streaming revenue grew more slowly than the electronic music market as a whole. What outpaced it was "expanded rights": merchandise, direct-to-consumer sales, and sponsorships, which surged 21% year-over-year. That’s a real structural shift, not a one-off: labels and artists are increasingly making more of their new money from selling things and partnerships around the music than from the recordings themselves, at least in relative growth terms.
Regional detail backs up the "thriving scenes" framing report author Mark Mulligan used to describe the year: the top global markets grew by 11% as a group, well ahead of the 7% global average, and Indonesia specifically saw a 77% jump in electronic music listeners on Spotify — a single-country number large enough to meaningfully move the regional picture on its own.
The AI number that needs its own context
One figure from the report is easy to misread: revenue from AI and stem-separation tools is up 651% since 2023. That’s a real number, but it’s a percentage change from a very small starting point — 2023 revenue for that category was tiny, so a 651% increase describes a category that’s growing fast, not one that’s suddenly large. It’s worth watching as a trend, not treating as evidence that AI tools are now a major line item in a $15.1 billion market.
Mulligan’s own read on why
Mulligan’s own framing for the report leans into resilience rather than just growth: "2025 was another good year for the global electronic music market with growth rooted in thriving scenes," he said, adding that the industry doing well "against a backdrop of global uncertainty and disruptive technological change points both to the resilience of the industry and that the escapist role of the dance floor has never been more important." That’s the report author’s own interpretation, not an independently verified causal claim — but the underlying numbers (accelerating growth, a shift toward expanded rights, a specific market like Indonesia posting outsized gains) are the real, sourced facts a $15 billion valuation is actually built on.