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Some of the biggest music stories in 2024 revealed inalienable truths. Kendrick beat Drake, once and for all; on the heels of her Eras Tour, the highest-grossing tour in history, Taylor Swift is the biggest Pop star in the world; and people like their Pop music served country-fried, as evidenced by Shaboozeys massive A Bar Song and Post Malones Nashville-forward album F-1 Trillion. But that’s the tip of the iceberg of what streaming and record sales data can reveal about where the industry is headed. Luckily, Luminatethe analytics firm whose data powers the Billboard chartsis the keeper of the keys on everything from streaming numbers and live music attendance to ascendant genres and the listening patterns of emerging markets. The media-data company had a lot of numbers to work within 2024, global streams reached nearly 5 trillion. Here are five key takeaways from Luminates year-end music report that forecast where music is going in 2025. 1. The pop girlies are just getting started When it came to hot genres, by mid 2024, the year was looking a lot like 2023with Latin music seeing the strongest listener growth in the U.S. But a lot can change in six months. Led by solo female performers, pop music triumphed. With Taylor Swift (12.8 billion streams) and Billie Eilish (4.5 billion streams) leading the pack, women solo acts occupied seven pop’s 10 most-streamed artists in the U.S. There were 47 female pop artists in the genres top 100 artistsincluding Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roanyet they drove nearly two out of every three songs streamed. Pop may have experienced the steepest rise, but as far as genre popularity goes, R&B and hip-hop still hold court. Just about one in every four audio streams last year was R&B/hip-hop, said Jaime Marconette, Luminates VP of music insights and industry relations, on a recent webinar. Still, the battle for genre primacy rages on, with country seeing significant upticks in 2024 thanks to international markets. Since last year, Marconette continued, R&B and hip-hops overall piece of the streaming pie is actually down 2.3 percentage points. 2. Gen Z will shell out for a concert If streaming allows artists to build a fanbase, then that fandom manifests at live performances. This past year, Gen Z unseated millennials for the first time as the biggest live music spenders, with the younger cohort specifically driven by music festivals more than any other demographic. In the second quartertypically when festival tickets go on sale ahead of the summer seasonGen Z spent an average of $38 per month on live events, which is 23% higher than the average listener. Although millennials have been dethroned, they continue to spend more on individual concerts than the festival-prone Gen Zers. Despite Gen Zs predilection towards festivals, Luminates data indicates that across all music listeners, the increasing price of live events is the largest barrier to entry, with 68% of live music goers citing ticket cost as something keeping them from attending concertsthe highest percentage in the history of Luminates audience reporting. According to the U.S. News & World Report, music festivals in 2024 cost between $200 and $600 on average, not counting additional expenses for travel, food, and lodging. Meanwhile, Pollster reports that last years 100 top music tours averaged $122.84. 3. TV, short-form, and video games fuel music discovery What people watch has long influenced what they listen to, but Luminates Streaming Viewership model is able to track the minutes watched of the years most popular music documentaries and offer insight into how viewership leads directly to streams. The eponymous Beach Boys documentary, for example, resulted in the legacy act seeing two bumps in streaming: one when the documentary was announced and another at the time of its release. People watch the documentary and then they go listen to the music, Marconette said. TV is particularly influential for millennials, who are 30% more likely than the average listener to discover music through streamers exclusive TV shows. Among other forms of content like short-form video, livestreams, and gaming, the endless permutations of genre and platform are ripe for different types of music discovery. In the U.S., fans of J-Pop are 73% more likely than average to discover music on platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok, whereas Afropop fans are 188% more likely to make their own discoveries on Twitch than the average listener. Video games, meanwhile, lead fans to more hip-hop and rap, with those genre’s listeners 87% more likely to find music through games than the average listener. 4. International listeners are boosting streamers’ bottom lines In 2024, the global music industry hit 4.8 trillion streamsa single-year record and a year-on-year increase of 14%. Perhaps more remarkably, that jump represents a 75% increase in on-demand audio streams since 2022. But streaming isn’t just a volume gamestrong results and, streamers say, higher royalties, are driven by ad-free, subscription-based streaming. International markets are showing growth, but the markets that stream the most aren’t necessarily adopting premium plans proportional to their listening. Brazil, for example ranks No. 4 in total streaming, but 34th in premium growth. Latin America has led overall international premium growth since 2021, but in 2024 Asia, followed by Eastern Europe led international premium growth. At the top of the pack was Turkey, which saw a 17.8% jump in premium streams, followed by Croatia (16.1%, Romania, Malaysia, South Korea, and Slovakia). 5. Global music drives cultural exchangewith some limitations Growth in international streaming has given Luminate a trove of data that can help quantify the ways in which globalized music drives cultural exchange. This year, the debuted its Export Power Score, which ranks countries’ ability to export music globally based on factors that include artist streaming rank, a country’s market share, and the total number of countries listening to international artists. “You can use these metrics to really start evaluating the cultural impact that happens through music from a country, but you can also analyze some different trade relationships,” Marconette said. For several countries,language is a determining factor, with their top importers of content often sharing the same language. But in English-speaking markets, English-language artists are losing streaming share to non-English acts. In the U.S., artists from Mexico and Chile are making gains, while Indian artists showed streaming increases in the U.K. and Australia. Additionally, country made gains in English-speaking international markets in 2024, and Latin music found popularity in Portugal. In one area of cultural exchange, all roads lead back to one American artist in particular. Swedish songwriters Max Martin and Shellback were two of 2024’s most-streamed songwriters, but not because they were behind a breakout artist from last year like Chappell Roan’s songwriting collaborator Dan Nigro (No. 4). But both contributed heavily to 1989, which Taylor Swift re-released at the end of 2023, helping make them some of last year’s hottest songwriterswith Swift leading the pack.
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When Ginni Rometty was CEO of technology corporation IBM, she introduced skills-first hiring, arguing that the filters we typically use, such as education and experience, are not helpful in many jobs. Instead, companies should ask themselves what skills are required to succeed in a given rolesay, computer programming or selling softwareand then find job seekers who either have or want to acquire those skills, even if they dont have a computer science or business degree. By creating on-ramps through internship and apprenticeship opportunities, which are more common in European countries, IBM was able to dramatically broaden its talent pool. A skills-based approach holds the promise of better matches between jobs and employees, Rometty and coauthors suggest. The question, then, is how to best assess an applicants skills during this stage of the hiring process. Do the typical techniques used today, such as interviews and assessment tools, enable us to identify the best talent for the job? Unfortunately, the evidence suggests the answer is likely no. Interviews, for example, are fraught with problems. Numerous biases can lead us astray. To name but a few: In-group bias makes us prefer people who look like we do; stereotypes lead us to prefer candidates who look like the typical employee; halo effects cause us to put too much weight on first impressions; and confirmation bias makes us look for evidence confirming our gut instincts while ignoring contrary information. Sadly, seeing an actual person and receiving additional information such as demeanor and appearance did not counteract interviewer bias. In some ways, being confronted with another human makes things worse. We cannot help but be influenced by what job applicants wear (our favorite color maybe?), how they speak (with a dialect maybe?), and how they look (attractive maybe?). Based on a large data set from entrepreneurial pitch competitions as well as laboratory experiments in the U.S., we know that such irrelevant factors affect evaluators. Investors favored pitches delivered by men, especially attractive men, even when the substance of the pitch was identical to the pitches presented by women. In light of this, we should not be surprised that interviews, particularly unstructured ones, are bad predictors of future performance. It is in these unstructured contexts that unconscious bias flourishes. When people have discretion in their judgments, rules of thumb such as stereotypes are hard to avoid. Here are a few ways to make interviews and other formal assessment tools more effective and fair: Create an Interview Checklist It all starts with a simple list. What is it that you want to evaluate? Determine the skills, knowledge, and competencies a successful candidate should have and design the questions you want to ask accordingly. Each question should elicit information that allows you to better assess something you care aboutand, ideally, focus squarely on the competencies required. We are always astonished to discover that questions like Please tell us about yourself or What are your greatest strengths? are still beloved by many interviewers. What competencies are these questions testing, exactly? It is also important to define the criteria you will use to evaluate responses beforehand so that you know what you are looking for when talking to a candidate. It is easy to be swayed by, say, the first candidates vision but then completely focus on execution when you talk to the second candidate. The list will help you focus and make sure you collect comparable information on all the criteria you care about. To conduct a gold standard structured interview, ask all candidates the same set of questions in the same order. Determine a scoring rubric and the weights you want to give to each question beforehand. You might want to weight all of them equally or you may decide that the responses to your first and your fourth question are essential, so they should get more weight. Improve the Interview Process In addition to designing a set of questions based on what you look for in a candidate and deciding on the scoring of the responses and weighting of the questions, you also need to think about who will be involved in the interview process. Note that while it is helpful for candidates to meet a diverse set of interviewers, diversity on the selection. In interviews, have candidates meet the evaluators one-on-one. While panel interviews are common, we advise against them. On a panel, interviewers are unable to form truly independent judgments as they will be influenced by each other, increasing the likelihood that they fall prey to groupthink, where the groups judgment is worse than the aggregate of the interviewers individual assessments. Much of this influence is subtle and unconscious, such as noticing whether a fellow interviewer is leaning forward or back (indicating interest or disinterest in what the candidate is saying); whether their tone of voice is excited or judgmental; and whether they are nodding along and taking prolific notes as the candidate is speaking, or checking the messages on their phone instead. When interviewing, take notes for each response received and compare candidates responses horizontally. Submit your scores multiplied by the weight you have assigned to the question to the person leading the recruitment process (often, someone from HR) who can aggregate all final scores received for each candidate. Much like you should not meet with a job candidate in a group, you should not discuss your thoughts with other evaluators before you have submitted your scores. It is just too easy to fall right back into what you have successfully averted by meeting with the candidates individually: groupthink. The territory is particularly treacherous if you hear the most senior persons opinion before you have made up your own mind. A good practice is that even in the final calibration meeting, after everyone has submitted their scores, the most senior person speaks last. You cannot leave the evaluation of your candidates up to your gut instinct. The more discipline we can add to the evaluation processby moving from unstructured to structured interviews and from informal to formal skills-based assessment toolsthe more likely we will be able to identify the best possible job candidate. And what is even better, in most cases the additional rigor also helps us overcome our biased assessments, particularly if we examine the impacts our tests might have on various groups beforehand. From the book MAKE WORK FAIR: Data-Driven Design for Real Results by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi Copyright 2025 by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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President Donald Trumps executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskas Denali, the tallest peak in the country, has resulted in lots of discussion. While for some, such renaming might seem less important than the big problems the country faces, there is a formal process in the United States for renaming places, and that process is taken seriously. Usually, so people dont get confused, official, agreed-upon names are used by the government. In the U.S., place names are standardized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which is part of the U.S. Geological Survey, the agency in charge of making maps. In his executive order, Trump asks the Board on Geographic Names to honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans and change its policies and procedures to reflect that. Usually, renaming a place starts locally. The people in the state or county propose a name change and gather support. The process in each state is different. How to change a place name Minnesota recently changed the name of a large lake in Minneapolis to Bde Maka Ska, which the Minneapolis Park Board described as a Dakota name for the lake that has been passed down in oral history for many years. The board voted to change the name and took its request to the county commissioners. When the county agreed, the request was then sent to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, which made it official for Minnesota. Then, the state of Minnesota sent the request to the Board on Geographic Names, which made it official for the entire U.S. Its a lot of paperwork for something so seemingly minor, but people get passionate about place names. It took 40 years to rename Denali from the name established in the late 19th century, Mount McKinley. The state of Alaska requested the name change in 1975, but the Board on Geographic Names didnt take action. Members of the Ohio congressional delegation President William McKinley was from Ohio objected over many years to requests to rename the mountain, and the board did not act on those requests. The president appoints the secretary of the Interior Department. The secretary works with the heads of related agencies to appoint the Board on Geographic Names. Current committee policy states, Input from State geographic names authorities, land management agencies, local governments, and Tribal Governments are actively pursued. In 2015, President Barack Obama named a new leader for the Department of the Interior, Sally Jewell. Just as Obama made a trip to Alaska in late August 2015, Jewell declared the name change official under a law that allows the secretary of the Interior to change a name if the board doesnt act on the proposal in a reasonable amount of time. Today were returning Mount McKinley to its native name – Denali, a step to reflect the heritage of Alaska Natives. pic.twitter.com/WyzQImKymX— President Obama (@POTUS44) August 31, 2015 This name change recognizes the sacred status of Denali to many Alaska Natives, Jewell said. The name Denali has been official for use by the State of Alaska since 1975, but even more importantly, the mountain has been known as Denali for generations. With our own sense of reverence for this place, we are officially renaming the mountain Denali in recognition of the traditions of Alaska Natives and the strong support of the people of Alaska. If someone objects to a name change, they could ask the courts to rule on whether the name change was made legally. Going back to Bde Maka Ska, some people objected to changing the name from Lake Calhoun, so they took the state natural resources agency to court. Eventually, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the name change was done correctly. Alaskas two U.S. senators and prominent state figures have strongly objected to Trumps renaming attempt. How not to change a place name Renaming the Gulf of Mexico is a different kind of case, however, from renaming a geographic place within U.S. borders. The gulf is not within the territorial U.S. On the coast, the first 12 miles from shore are considered part of that country, but outside of that is international waters. The Board on Geographic Names could change the name to Gulf of America on official U.S. maps, but there is no international board in charge of place names. Each country decides what to call places. And there is no official way for the U.S. to make other countries change the name. Its possible that the U.S. could formally ask other countries to change the name or even impose sanctions against countries that dont comply. If the names were officially changed in the U.S., the government would use the new names in official documents, signage and maps. As for all the people and companies in the world that make maps, they usually use the official names. But there is nothing that would force them to, if they believed that a certain name is more widely recognized. On Jan. 24, 2025, the U.S. Department f the Interior issued a statement on the name changes: In accordance with President Donald J. Trumps recent executive order, the Department of the Interior is proud to announce the implementation of name restorations that honor the legacy of American greatness, with efforts already underway. “As directed by the President, the Gulf of Mexico will now officially be known as the Gulf of America and North Americas highest peak will once again bear the name Mount McKinley . . . The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, under the purview of the Department of the Interior, is working expeditiously to update the official federal nomenclature in the Geographic Names Information System to reflect these changes, effective immediately for federal use. This story has been updated to reflect the Department of Interiors statement on Jan. 25, 2025. Innisfree McKinnon is an associate professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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