A quarter-century after Napster and online piracy plunged the music industry into financial plight, Canadians are paying to stream more music than ever – to the tune of three billion songs a week.
The country passed this milestone the week of Dec. 15, according to music-industry data provider Luminate. It heralds a new era of maturity for the reshaped industry – one that is wildly different and often more difficult for musicians to navigate than the eras of CDs, records and downloads that preceded it.
Even with illegal song-downloading no longer an existential threat, working musicians often struggle to survive on the fraction of a cent each stream pays out, and touring costs have exploded. So, while the recording industry itself is reaping revenue, as are major stars, many musicians still find themselves left behind by this economic model.
Research from Music Canada has found that nearly 15 million Canadians use subscription music streamers, allowing them access to tens of millions of tracks for about $12 a month.
“People really enjoy being able to listen to anything they want from anywhere in the world,” says Patrick Rogers, chief executive officer of Music Canada, which largely does advocacy work on behalf of domestic branches of the three major global record labels: Universal, Sony and Warner. The surging streaming numbers, he adds, suggest that fans are happy to pay for music despite the surge in piracy that marked the turn of the millennium.
Streaming-revenue payouts are usually opaque and built on confidential record-industry contracts, but it is generally understood that the services pay much less than a penny for each stream. And while touring became the lifeline of working musicians after piracy short-circuited the recording sector, the costs of performing on the road – from travel to accommodations plus visas – have soared in the past five years.
Independent artist Tess Roby says she might get $1000 every 14-16 months for her albums being streamed online.Patrick Boivin/Supplied
Tess Roby, an independent Montreal-based artist who makes exploratory electronic music, says she might get $1,000 once every 14 to 16 months from her two albums on streaming services.
The recording industry reached US$29.6-billion in revenue in 2024 – the highest level in years, but in a reshaped world. Consumers may be choosing streaming over piracy, but they’re also choosing it over more lucrative physical media, as Music Canada’s Rogers notes.
“The other model went away because people weren’t buying CDs any more,” he said.
Napster shut down in 2001, but by then the mindset of devaluing music had taken hold: Spending $20 for a CD filled with songs available on the internet seemed ridiculous. By 2014, global recorded-music revenue hit rock bottom, with a roughly 40-per-cent collapse from CD-era heights. Legal song downloads, through services such as Apple’s iTunes, kept that number from sinking even lower, but streaming was also starting to play a part.
Spotify launched in Canada that year, followed a year later by Apple Music. Even then, musicians noticed that subscription streaming brought in less money than sales.
In the years since, their protests have only gotten louder, especially in the debate over the Online Streaming Act, whose mandated Canadian-content payments by streamers have been delayed by a federal court. Some artists pulled out of Spotify in 2025 after years of frustration that culminated with its co-founder’s deepening ties to a military drone firm.
Roby is a member of United Musicians and Allied Workers, which has been pushing for stronger artists’ rights in the streaming era, including giving musicians a penny for each stream. There’s also ACTRA RACS, a non-profit that collects royalties around the world for Canadian performers. It’s been campaigning to amend the Copyright Act to guarantee payouts for all artists who appear on a recording whenever it’s streamed.
The issue is made more pressing here as Canadian streaming growth appears to be outpacing other markets, says Will Page, Spotify’s former chief economist who now consults broadly, including for Music Canada. In the data he’s aggregated, he found that Britain, with a population about 65 per cent bigger than Canada’s, only occasionally passed four billion weekly streams in 2024. Italy, about 40 per cent more populous, had only recently crossed the two billion weekly streams mark.
Luminate figures suggest that listening isn’t enormously top-heavy: The 10 most-streamed artists the week Canada crossed the three-billion streams mark accounted for just 4.53 per cent of what Canadians listened to – which Music Canada suggests is a sign that streaming wealth is actually being spread widely.
Montreal-based musician, producer and spokesperson for Regroupement des artisans de la musique, David Bussières, advocates for more equitable treatment of musicians in the digital economy.Stéphanie Payez/Éklectik Média
But while three billion weekly streams “seems to be the greatest number ever,” only a small portion of this comes back to Canadian “and especially Quebec francophone creators,” says David Bussières, a Montreal-based musician, producer and long-time advocate for more equitable treatment of musicians in the digital economy.
In 2023, only 8.5 per cent of the top 10,000 most-streamed songs in the province were in French – with Quebec francophone artists accounting for just 5 per cent. Yet 27 per cent of digital albums and 18 per cent of physical albums sold were predominantly francophone.
Page argues that the sheer data provided by streaming services give musicians more clarity for how to plot their careers. Learning where fans are most concentrated, for example, can help with tour planning. “For artists, this is a paradigm shift,” the economist said.
Roby counters that the sheer amount of data that Spotify and its ilk offer the industry about popular songs has made it more difficult for newer artists to get a leg up – such as at music festivals, which she’s seen focus more on artists with streaming hits.
“They’re now looking at these metrics to make sure that they’re booking lineups of artists that will generate income for them,” Roby says. “This leads to less discovery of artists from being featured.”
For Tariq Hussain, who performs under his given name, it’s clear the way music is consumed has changed a lot between his first acclaimed mid-nineties albums, including The Basement Songs, and his new EP released last January, called Scroll Before You Sleep.
“As a consumer, I do appreciate the ease in which you can listen,” Tariq says, recalling the annoyance and cost of buying and schlepping around CDs.
With streaming, he says, “I like the fact that you can get your music out there as an artist without having to print physical items.” But it’s not lucrative. “I just don’t think about it in terms of monetary earnings. I don’t have an expectation of that any more.”