Last month on Valentine’s Day the biopic Bob Marley: One Love was released to global audiences. As of last weekend, the film depicting the iconic reggae artist’s life has grossed $160.5m worldwide while also opening to $28.7m in its first domestic box office weekend (February 16-18, 2024). As the new feature has driven substantial theater revenue, it has also driven audio streaming of Bob Marley’s music both in the U.S. and abroad.
Bob Marley’s Global On-Demand Audio (ODA) streaming has risen consistently throughout 2024, and during the first full music chart week after the film’s release (the week ending February 22, 2024), it was 150% higher than the week ending January 4, 2024, as his catalog topped 108m ODA streams. The U.S. total also showed a substantial +187% gain for the same time period and growth outside the U.S. was 131%.
Interestingly, the marketing and promotion window of the Bob Marley: One Love movie also drove consumption of the Bob Marley-focused episode of the Netflix original ReMastered: Who Shot the Sheriff?, which was originally released in October 2018. Using Luminate’s new Streaming Viewership Model we can see that the episode started growing in weekly minutes watched the week ending February 1, 2024, before peaking the week before the film’s release. The industry conversation around synch has mostly been thought of as a one-way impact where analysts have tried to answer the question of “how much music consumption did a specific synch placement drive?” However, this model illustrates that it can also be thought of in reverse, as off-platform events drive viewers to discover more Streaming Video On-Demand (SVOD) content as well.
From Luminate Insights’ consumer research data, we can see that reggae fans spend a large amount of time each month listening to music. Reggae fans in the U.S. report listening to 70 hours of music per month, which is more than 50% higher than the average U.S. listener’s 45 hours per month. And while reggae fans are 20% more likely to report discovering new music through movies/movie soundtracks, they are a whopping +76% more likely to discover music via playlists on streaming services, demonstrating their use of editorial-driven content to find new artists.
Beyond the continuing rise of Bob Marley’s catalog, his talented lineage continues to produce hits. In late February, YG Marley (grandson of Bob, and son of artists Lauryn Hill and Rohan Marley) cracked the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. Top 10 with “Praise Jah In The Moonlight.” This is the first reggae track to break the Top 10 on this chart with 23.7m Ex-U.S. streams during the week ending February 29, 2024, and suggests that there may be more reggae on the rise.
Source:
Luminate Consumption Data
Luminate Artist & Genre Tracker: 2023 (U.S.)
Luminate Streaming Viewership (M)
Luminate Film & TV
