Luminate Midyear Report 2026: R&B/Hip-Hop Falls, Dance Rises

Approximately one in every four streams today are for songs that fall into the R&B/hip-hop classification, but the genre’s share of listening has continued to decline year-over-year for the last few years. Since mid-year 2025, R&B/hip-hop as a category fell 1.6% — a percentage that was picked up by growing genres like dance/electronic, country and Latin. 

The genre has also “experienced the sharpest decline in equivalent market share since 2023” on the Billboard 200 albums chart, giving way to gains by pop, country, rock and Latin. R&B/hip-hop used to make up well over 40% of Billboard 200 market share in the first half of 2023, but it’s fallen to about 30% at midyear in 2026.

Dance/electronic grew the most in the first half of 2026. The genre is up 18.9% year-over-year in U.S. on-demand audio streams, led by hot current acts like John Summit and Disco Lines along with a boom for dance songs released between 2015 and 2017. In fact, half of the top 10 dance/electronic songs in the first half of the year were from the 2015-2017 period. World music is also up, growing 11.9% year-over-year. It’s also the genre which has the highest percentage of current listening: 34% of popular world music songs are 0-18 months old, followed by songs that are 18-60 months old with a 26.5% share of listening in the genre.

Older music dominates in rock: 75% of rock listening comes from tracks older than 60 months, marking a 5% uplift in deep catalog listening from this time last year. Current hits for the genre this year, however, include Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide which earned 1.35 million total equivalent album sales. Despite a lack of strong current listenership, rock remains the second-most streamed genre in the U.S. behind R&B/Hip-Hop.

It comes as little surprise that K-pop groups like BTS, ENHYPEN and ATEEZ lead in mass market physical album sales, meaning sales conducted at big box retailers like Target and Walmart. Independent retailers are losing ground this year to the bigger chains, falling from a 36.6% share of sales in 2025 to 32.1% in 2026, a dip of 4.5%. E-commerce sales also saw a 1.3% dip, falling from 27.4% of sales in 2025 to 26.1% this year.

The Luminate report finds that upon comparing genres, K-pop and indie rock fans are the most engaged and most likely to buy products from their favorite artists. Conversely, country and pop fans are the most likely to be lean-back listeners, preferring to stream an artist but not necessarily buy merch and physical albums. 

Between K-pop and indie rock, the latter genre has a larger percentage of overall listeners who are what Luminate calls “purchase-based superfans,” at about 40% of fans. K-pop has about 38% of fans who are purchase-based, but the genre ranks higher than indie rock in “engagement-based fans” with nearly 35% of the total fanbase, versus 30% for indie rock. 

For the last decade, physical sales have climbed. But, until now, most of the conversation has been around vinyl record sales. Now, U.S. CD sales are surging, up 16% to 16.3 million units in the first half of 2026 — outpacing vinyl, which grew by 2.4%. Luminate did not state how many units of vinyl were sold in comparison, though vinyl sales likely still are higher than CDs despite the slower growth rate.

CD sales have K-pop to thank for such a surge. If BTS’ latest album ARIRANG and other K-pop sales are taken out of the equation, U.S. CD sales would have been up by 6.7% in the first half of 2026. Luminate suggests that this CD surge indicates the format is now being popularized as “an affordable collectible” for younger fans. “The act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself,” the report reads. 

Perhaps for some, CDs are even more important as an aesthetic product. According to Luminate, approximately half of Gen-Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player.

In the U.S., English-language songs declined in the first half of 2026, down from 88.1% in 2025 to 87.1% as streaming consumption continues to diversify. This year to date, nearly 1 in 10 streams in the U.S. are now in Spanish (or 9.4%), a figure that is thanks, in part, to a massive year for Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny, who performed at the Super Bowl halftime show earlier this year. Korean-language music also stays steady this year at a U.S. market share of 1.1%. It remains the third most popular language for music in America, owing to the continued strength of K-pop hits. 

Latin music is also benefiting from a growing number of “casual” U.S. listeners. According to Luminate, in Q3 of 2021, 44% of music fans in the U.S. considered themselves casual listeners of Latin. As of Q1 in 2026, that number is now 54%, indicating that the genre is becoming more a part of mass market culture in the United States and breaking much further than its traditional Spanish-speaking audience.

Despite the continued popularity of Latin music, the overall recent trend for English-language music in the U.S. is relatively steady: a four-year view reveals that its share is holding at around 87% to almost 89%, including an 88.8% share in FY 2023, and 87.5% share in 2024.

American artists hold a strong two-thirds market share in U.S. streaming, but the U.K. has been showing stable growth in American streaming since 2024, thanks to new stars like Olivia Dean and new heights achieved by longtime talents like Charli xcx. In 2024, U.K. talent held less than a 7% share of U.S. streaming. The following year, that share hit 7%, and in 2026 to date, its share rose to 7.8%.

It’s still early days for AI-generated or assisted music, which first hit the music industry’s radar in May 2023 with Ghostwriter’s Drake deepfake “Heart On My Sleeve,” but Luminate data shows that some AI songs are starting to stick. The highest on-demand audio streaming song in the U.S. is Breaking Rust’s country song “Livin’ on Borrowed Time,” with 19 million streams domestically and 13.4 ex-U.S. Outside of the U.S., the biggest AI-enabled track was “Papaoutai (Afro Soul)” by Chill77, Unjaps and Mikeeysmind — an AI remix of Stromae’s song of the same title. 

According to Spotify, the copyright of “Papaoutai (Afro Soul)” is now claimed by a little known label called Unjaps AB and Mosaert, Stromae’s label, “with courtesy of Stromae,” indicating that Stromae is aware of the AI remix and has claimed some level of royalty and ownership over it. Using AI to create new remixes of pre-existing hits has become a common practice — one that some artists embrace and some try to fight by taking those remixes down. 

Additionally, Luminate’s report states that 54% of U.S. musicians show “positive feelings and acceptance towards gen AI tools in music,” compared to 35% for non-musicians.