The Top 16 Music & Concerts Trends of 2025

Musicians add unique visuals to concerts, creating share-worthy moments to boost their brand

Orchestras have long recognized the appeal of playing music from famous movies and Disney films to attract a broader and younger audience, boosting their revenue.

Nowadays, many musicians are taking a similar approach but with a twist; they're adding unique visual elements to their concerts to make their events stand out. This not only differentiates their performances but also encourages audience members to take photos and share them on social media, helping to promote the concerts virally.

Sales for handpans – a newly popular instrument – surge as consumers seek out easy-to-play instruments

The handpan is a "minimum viable instrument"; It has very few notes and no sharps or flats (meaning it's much harder to play notes that clash). It's also easy to transport and easy to learn, a combination that makes it easy to show off in person.

Handpans fit into the general trend of products that produce an impressive output with little, but not zero, effort from the user. The effort must be non-zero because it's important the user still feels that they're actually making something, whether that's music (handpan), cooking (sous vide), or art (diamond painting kit). In fact, "easiest instrument to learn" is one of the top 3 Google search queries to do with easy solutions, among "easiest language to learn" and "easiest way to lose weight".

It’s no surprise that most of the social traffic going to sites selling handpans comes from YouTube. In contrast to common perception, YouTube is mostly about music. 15 of the top 20 most viewed videos of all time are music videos. Now, the rise of the handpan lets music YouTubers carve out white space for new content. With so many music covers and tutorials constantly being uploaded to the site, the introduction of a new instrument gives musical content creators a new way to differentiate their content.

Musicians increasingly turn to AI to help create music

From lyric writing to creating entire songs, musicians increasingly rely on AI, like many other professionals learning to apply AI to their work.

Demand for earplugs – to reduce noise at concerts, home, and beyond – outpaces stigma

Ear plugs were traditionally marketed to construction workers and musicians while mainstream adoption was hindered in large part because of the stigma: nobody wanted to seem dull for wearing earplugs at a concert. Some, in other environments, also said they worried that wearing earplugs could come off as rude.

But now, rising interest is transforming earplugs from niche to mainstream. Top brands, like Loop, mention “parenting”, “focus”, and “concerts” as common applications. Many consumers also mention using them to deal with noisy neighbors and being able to focus in crowded spaces. Even “earplugs for restaurants” is a top Google query (studies have shown that, on average, bars sell more drinks when the music is louder).

Part of Loop’s effort to decrease stigma was in making their earplugs sleek, like the Airpods that helped catalyze the earplug category’s growth. The company claims they offer 18db of reduction and flat attenuation, meaning that noise is still crystal clear and sounds the same, just less intense. The brand even promotes the hashtag “frontrow”, which has 1.5M tags on Instagram, framing the product as a tool that lets concertgoers take concerts to the next level.

Music distribution platforms expand focus from human-curated to automated selections as algorithmic playlists rising in importance

Music distributors enhance musicians' chances in algorithmic playlists by boosting engagement metrics necessary for algorithmic selection.

With Spotify's infinite shelf space, today's problem in the music industry is not only getting distribution but, more importantly, getting noticed—and this fight to get noticed is creating underground markets, even in Spotify's own backyard.

Around 30% of all songs played on Spotify are through official playlists. These playlists have consequently become some of the industry’s most valuable real estate and has led to a new form of payola, the illegal age-old practice of paying massive sums of money to get songs broadcast on the radio.

With streaming services, algorithmic playlists are more likely to pick up a new song or artist that is repeatedly listened to or saved. Platforms like Distrokid, today's version of a record label company, helps musicians boost these engagement metrics in order to be more likely to be picked up by the playlist algorithms.

Distrokid also handles distribution by submitting songs their musicians upload to all the major sites. While sites like TikTok and YouTube may not be thought of as key parts of the music industry, they are vital for distribution.

TikTok, in this context, was relatively under-the-radar because its audience was so young; it was growing, but adults hadn't heard of it. TikTok's importance to the music world was revealed when it propelled "Old Town Road" to #1 on the Billboard Top 100. Now, TikTok’s music distribution service, SoundOn, is seeing significant growth.

And in contrast to common perception, YouTube too, is mostly about music. 15 of the top 20 most viewed videos are music videos. Predicting the next big social site is a challenge even for experts—for musicians, the only hope is to be on every streaming service.

Music streaming expands to Africa with new model

In the US and Europe, one of the hardest parts of building a music streaming service is getting the label companies onboard. But in developing markets, the problem is much more around payment and infrastructure issues.

Africa represents almost 1/5th of the global population (and is set to grow faster than any other continent), but one without a dominant streaming music provider. Poor digital payment infrastructure and fragmented music labels meant that major streaming companies like Spotify historically ignored the market.

The same reasons that kept Spotify out, though, are the very reasons for the success of a separate company, in a separate industry: Transsion. Today, Transsion is the 2nd largest supplier of mobile phones in Africa. They reached this position by pioneering Africa-specific solutions like dual SIM card phones (unreliable networks meant that Africans often carried more than one network SIM), ultra-long battery life (power supply in Africa is relatively spotty), and even focusing on algorithms that optimize dark skin color in photographs while others had historically only optimized their algorithms for lighter skin.

This position allowed them to later create Boomplay, an Africa-focused Spotify challenger, that launched atop Transsion’s already wildly popular mobile phone base. Boomplay got immediate distribution by being the default music app on all Transsion phones leading ~70% of Transsion customers to also become active Boomplay users.

Africa's digital music ecosystem has existed for a long time, but primarily in an informal capacity. “Music blogs”, while technically illegal, are a popular distribution channel for artists—and many artists know that selling recorded music or licensing it won't be lucrative, so they aim for promotion that can help them sell tickets to live shows, where they make most of their money.

Boomplay is a case study in taking a disadvantage and turning it into a competitive strength: the market remains fragmented, and distribution is hard for companies that don’t have a deal with a phone manufacturer, so Boomplay is in a better position to keep Spotify out.