Europe may be home to a wide array of countries and cultures, and one thing that unites them is their love of music.
However, methods for music discovery on the continent are anything but monolithic, according to data from Luminate’s Global Music 360 survey for the first quarter of 2025.
There has been meaningful growth in the importance of short-form video in the UK and Italy with respect to music discovery, jumping 5 and 3 percentage points in popularity, respectively, since 2023. Just as in the U.S., TikTok is a particularly popular SFV platform across Europe, as are older social media platforms including Facebook.
Outside of social media, European music listeners are embracing a range of discovery sources. In Germany, for instance, browsing online music stores including Amazon and Rhapsody is the most popular method for music fans of all ages, while livestreaming platform Twitch has also climbed as a discovery source in the last year.
French music consumers, meanwhile, favor the usual streaming platforms, such as Spotify, but France-based Deezer remains a leading music DSP in its home country.
Zooming in on Gen Z, we can see in the UK that old-school blogs and forums are making a comeback: 13% of Gen Zers in the region discover music this way, making them almost 2.5 times more likely to do so than the average consumer there. This increase may be due to the UK’s notably vibrant music press, with longtime publications NME, Clash and Line of Best Fit continuing to support local scenes and indie artists.
Over in Germany and Italy, Gen Z music listeners are nearly 2.5 times more likely to discover new sounds through Twitch and video games — including Fortnite, which Luminate recently began tracking.
But even with the rise of online spaces being used as sources of discovery, growth abounds in other spaces as well, both digital and physical. In the UK, simply hearing a song out in public jumped four points compared with 2023.
Live music events saw the biggest increase in France since 2023 (+3 points), and the country is the only one of these four markets to see a bounce (+2 points) in music discovery through songs hitting big out of SVOD-exclusive series.
Check out Luminate’s Global Music 360 survey for insights into consumer attitudes toward the concert business and much more.
Source:
Luminate Global Music 360, Q1 2025
