English-language music is losing ground in the United States.
It accounted for 86% of on-demand audio streams in the country in the first quarter of 2026, down from 88.1% a year earlier, Luminate said in a new analysis, describing a long-term decline in the world’s largest recorded music market.
Listeners are increasingly turning to music in other languages, led by Spanish, which reached a 9.5% share of US on-demand audio (ODA) streams in the quarter, or close to one in 10.
That was up from a full-year 2025 share of 8.9% (see below).
Luminate said US artists still generated roughly two-thirds of the country’s on-demand audio streams, while adding that their share is eroding each year.
The company characterized the US market as evolving into a “vibrant international crossroads.”
The data was published on Tuesday (June 23) by Luminate‘s Insights team, ahead of the firm’s Midyear Music Report, which is due to be published next month (July).
Spanish-language streaming has been anchored by Bad Bunny, whom Luminate ranked as the No. 2 overall artist in the US through Q1 and credited with lifting Puerto Rico‘s streaming share.
The company said Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl halftime show performance helped push the Latin music genre to a weekly high of 2.74 billion US on-demand audio streams in the week ending Thursday, February 12, which it called an all-time record.
Luminate said Latin music has “fully shattered its ‘niche’ status” in the US, citing its consumer research.
Casual monthly listenership of Latin music rose from 41% in early 2024 to 56% in Q1 2026, meaning more than half of US listeners now count the genre among those they hear casually, the company said.
The shift extends beyond Latin music, with Korean-language streaming holding a 1.1% share of US on-demand audio in Q1, supported by K-pop acts including BTS.
Streams in all languages other than English, Spanish and Korean rose to 3.4% of the US total from 1.9% in 2025, Luminate said.
By artist country of origin, the UK, Mexico and Canada were the largest sources of US on-demand audio streams outside the US, Luminate said.
The UK‘s share rose to 7.8% so far this year from 7.0% in 2025, led by artists such as Olivia Dean, the company said.
Luminate said markets including Australia, led by Tame Impala, and Sweden, led by Zara Larsson, also recorded gains.
The company said the US had historically “acted as a gatekeeper,” requiring international artists to sing in English or adopt Western styles to find commercial success.
Luminate said today’s streaming infrastructure now lets fans discover music regardless of language, and argued that record labels’ A&R teams can no longer rely solely on local talent pools.
Luminate has tracked the decline of English-language streaming share for several years, reporting in 2024 that English-language tracks made up 88.8% of the top 10,000 US tracks in 2023, with Spanish-language tracks at 8.1%.
In its 2025 Year-End Music Report, the company said total US on-demand audio streams reached 1.4 trillion, with Latin music accounting for 120.9 billion of them.
Luminate said the future of US music streaming is “global, diverse and uniquely decentralized.”Music Business Worldwide
