The Australian Recording Industry Association, ARIA, published its 2025 trade figures on 19 March 2026. Wholesale revenue rose 1.4% to AUD 727 million, a seventh consecutive year of growth.
That headline is doing a lot of work. The market grew. Australian music inside it did not.
The growth is real, and it is thin
From ARIA’s 2025 release:
- Subscription streaming: AUD 517 million, 71.0% of the total market.
- Ad-supported and video streaming: AUD 130 million combined.
- Physical: AUD 67.9 million, up 11.0%, with CDs up 29.6% to AUD 21 million.
- Vinyl: AUD 46.3 million, up 4.1%, still 68.2% of physical revenue.
A 1.4% rise barely clears inflation. ARIA chief executive Annabelle Herd tied the slower pace to a maturing subscription base, the same plateau visible in the UK and Western Europe, The Music Network reported.
Local repertoire is losing share inside a growing market
APRA AMCOS, the songwriter and publisher collecting societies covering Australia and New Zealand, quantified it in its Year in Review of 15 October 2025. Local music streams fell 31% over five years and now make up 9.5% of all streams across the two countries, while total consumption grew roughly 50%, per Music Business Worldwide.
A companion Australia Institute study found local stream share fell from 12% to 8%, and Australian artists inside the top 10,000 most-streamed dropped from 932 to 773.
Former Spotify and PRS chief economist Will Page framed the mechanism plainly: “The algorithms of streaming services might recognise language, but they ignore geography.”
The charts stopped showing Australians first
- Six months into 2026, one Australian single had reached the ARIA Top 10: Tame Impala’s “Dracula”.
- Four homegrown singles entered the Top 40, against five at the same point in 2025 and eight in 2024, per Noise11.
- No Australian act has topped the singles chart since June 2022.
- Albums look healthier: 65 Australian albums cracked the Top 40, versus 30 a year earlier.
ARIA split its charts in September 2025, moving tracks older than two years onto a separate ARIA on Replay chart to clear space for new releases. RMIT researchers writing in The Conversation noted the Top 100 had slipped from almost entirely new singles in 2018 to about 70% new by 2024.
The money is already offshore
- Spotify paid AUD 330 million to Australian rightsholders in 2025, up 7% year on year, per its 3 March 2026 newsroom post.
- More than 80% of Australian artists’ Spotify royalties came from listeners outside Australia, and Australia ranks inside the platform’s global top 10 exporters.
- More than half of those royalties were attributed to independent artists and labels, as Music Ally reported.
- More than 370 Australian artists now earn over AUD 100,000 a year from Spotify alone.
Australia’s local content quotas for streaming video took effect on 1 January 2026. Music streaming carries no equivalent obligation, so an Australian release’s discovery is still decided by editors and recommendation models, not policy.
What this means for an Australian independent
If four fifths of the money is foreign, the domestic chart is a marketing outcome, not a business plan.
- Deliver to every territory from day one. Spotify’s Australian export data points at the US, UK, Germany, Brazil and France, not just AU and NZ.
- Get the DDEX metadata right. DDEX means Digital Data Exchange, the standard message format distributors use to send audio, artwork and rights data to streaming services. Mismatched artist identifiers are why a Sydney act fails to link to its own profile in Berlin.
- Lock recording splits and register works with APRA AMCOS before release. Seven of the top ten Australian export songs Spotify tracked were international collaborations, and collaborations are where splits break.
- Do not write off a two-year-old track. ARIA moved catalogue to its own chart, but catalogue is still where a large share of streaming income sits.
The pattern repeats across mid-sized English-language markets: Canada, at 92% offshore, and the UK, at three quarters. Australia sits further along the curve with a smaller home base to fall back on.
The distributor’s job here is unglamorous: DDEX-native delivery to regional platforms the majors-focused services skip, plus per-territory royalty reporting that names the country that actually paid instead of one blended number. When 80% of the income is offshore, that is the difference between guessing and planning.
