What Isn’t Changing in 2026: The Fundamentals Still Shaping the Music Industry

Every year, the music industry predicts its next transformation.

New platforms. New formats. New strategies. New rules. And there is no doubt that lots of things are about to change in 2026.

What I keep questioning, though, is the assumption that because so much is changing in the music industry, the fundamentals somehow stop applying.

From where I sit as a marketer of music, the opposite also feels true.

As the industry continues to evolve and grow in scale, the basics don’t fade into the background. They become harder to ignore.

Music still does the heavy lifting

What’s not changing in the music industry is the role music itself plays.

Taste in music is subjective, obviously. What touches one person might leave another completely cold. But there’s still a core truth that’s hard to escape: music needs to clear a certain threshold if it’s going to resonate. Listening behavior over the past decade hasn’t changed nearly as much as we like to tell ourselves. Only a small percentage of releases ever generate repeat plays. Global music consumption keeps growing year over year, but value still concentrates around music people return to—not music they scroll past and forget.

Marketing, content, and trends can amplify songs. They can help something travel faster or farther. But they can’t manufacture an emotional connection. Attention might be engineered, but feeling can’t.

As Dave puts it on his track My 27th Birthday: “While we’re counting numbers, how does the music make you feel?”

The artist–listener relationship is still the core

You know what else isn’t going to change in 2026? The relationship between artists and their fans.

For all the complexity we’ve added to this industry, this part remains surprisingly simple.

Careers are built when an artist creates music that matters to the fans.

Everything else — platforms, tools, teams, strategies — exists to support the relationship between artists and listeners, not replace it. Whenever we lose sight of this fundamental core, things tend to get noisy, expensive, and overly complex very quickly.

For more information, go read Understanding the Fan Journey

Where data ends and culture begins

Another fundamental that won’t change this year is the fact that culture will always move faster than data. I’m a big believer in the data behind music. As a music marketer, streams, saves, skips, shares, growth curves, and revenue flows are invaluable for understanding what has already happened. They help me and our team diagnose problems, spot patterns, and avoid flying completely blind.

What’s important to point out is that data is always retrospective. It often struggles to capture early signals—before there’s anything to measure.

Music moving through word of mouth. Group chats. One-to-one private messages. Small communities forming around an artist. The way people start dressing, talking, or identifying with them. The feeling in a room when an artist walks on stage, and a specific song is played live.

Some of the most meaningful signals in music are felt long before they can be measured.

The music marketers who make the biggest impact don’t choose between data and instinct. They learn how to read both—and, just as importantly, when to trust each.

The album isn’t dead yet

Every year, we hear that the album is dead. It’s been declared dead for decades now. And yes, we live in a singles-driven world. Release strategies are flexible. Not every artist needs to make an album anymore.

But albums never really stopped mattering to music fans and artists. They just stopped being mandatory as part of every release strategy.

For some artists, albums still provide context, coherence, and identity. Singles create moments. Albums build a story and sometimes even a world. When albums land, they give fans something to live inside, not just something to click.

That distinction still matters.

Hype fades. Quality Catalog compounds

Sustainable value in 2026 (and beyond) comes from longevity, not hype.

Short-term attention is loud. Long-term value is quiet. Viral moments burn fast. Catalog grows slowly.

This is something independent labels understand instinctively. Predictable revenue rarely comes from spikes. It comes from diversified, long-tail usage — streaming, physical, sync, licensing.

Longevity still lives in records (and the music) people come back to.

Learn how to activate your back catalog on DSPs->

Physical formats still matter

Physical formats have ebbed and flowed, but they’ve never completely disappeared. Vinyl sales in the U.S. have now grown for nearly two decades straight, reaching close to 50 million units annually. That growth isn’t about convenience. It’s about intention.

When fans buy music in physical formats, they’re not optimizing. They’re committing. They’re saying: this matters enough to own.

Physical formats didn’t survive by accident. It survived because the connection between the music and the fans never went fully digital.

Ownership of music still carries weight.

Counterculture still drives culture

Another fundamental that won’t change in 2026 is where culture actually begins: on the edges. The core of the music world is counterculture. Most major movement in music started on the edges. Hip hop. Disco. Punk. Jungle. House. Rock. Jazz. Samba. Some were even illegal! Samba, for instance, was criminalized and actively persecuted in Brazil in the early 20th century.

None of these movements were designed for mass appeal. They emerged from specific scenes, communities, and social contexts long before the industry learned how to package and sell them to the rest of the world.

What we often call “niche” today is usually just early-stage culture. Focused, not small.

Engagement still begins inside scenes before it spreads outward. Counterculture is created in scenes; exposure just makes it visible.

Human curation isn’t disappearing. It’s resurfacing

For years, people have been speculating that human curation and discovery are dead. But as discovery becomes more automated, fatigue with algorithmic sameness is slowly starting to show.

There’s already evidence that younger listeners aren’t discovering more music because of algorithms. In many cases, they’re discovering less.

Among Gen Z, friends and word of mouth consistently outperform algorithmic feeds as discovery drivers. In surveys of college radio DJs under 25, nearly 70% cited personal recommendations as their primary way of finding new music.

At the same time, human-led spaces are quietly expanding again.

College radio stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now oversubscribed. Platforms like NTS Radio, Colors and Bandcamp, along with tastemakers like Dereck Gee who’ve earned credibility over time, continue to introduce new music more effectively than systems designed to reinforce familiarity. Human curation doesn’t scale efficiently.

But it creates context. And context is becoming more valuable to listeners, not less.

Live and IRL still matter more than ever

As music creation and discovery become more automated, live experiences are carrying more cultural weight, not less.

Fans don’t just want access to artists. They want shared, physical moments with the artist and with others who love the same music. Live experiences are where trust is built between artists and fans, where fan identity forms, and where community becomes tangible.

We’re already seeing artists experiment with this balance. Fred again.., DJ AG, and ARI at Home have shown new ways to use live performances to create connection first, then let digital platforms amplify it. In-person listening parties are also becoming more popular, fostering community in the process.

In each case, the live moment isn’t replaced by online experiences. It’s what gives that reach meaning.

Touring is expensive, and not every artist can scale live in the same way.

But participation, proximity, and shared experience are becoming more valuable especially in the age of AI.

Independent labels are still cultural investors

Lots of folks like to talk about the death of the indie label. Artists today can go solo. For some, that’s absolutely the right path for their careers.

But for many artists, the realities of creating, marketing, and monetizing their music can be overwhelming. This is why so many of them choose to work with independent labels to grow their careers.

ORCA’s data tells a clear story about the role independent labels continue to play. In 2023 alone, the labels studied invested $134 million across 569 artists—roughly $236,000 per artist.

Nearly half of that investment went into infrastructure, teams, and long-term capacity. The result was almost $239 million in revenue, with a significant portion flowing back to artists.

The best independent record labels aren’t just intermediaries. They’re taking real financial and creative risk, betting on sustainable careers, not just viral moments.

Learn how indie record labels can stay in the drivers seat

Structure Is What Makes Scale Possible

One thing that hasn’t changed at all is this: music only makes money at scale if there’s infrastructure connecting all the pieces.

From the outside, the music industry can look deceptively simple. Music is created. Songs go up. Fans press play. Streams turn into numbers. Numbers turn into royalties.

But what looks simple on the outside has always relied on something far more complex to hold it together.

Metadata, contracts, and rights define ownership. Registrations make claims legible. Licensing allows music to be used. Reporting and payments turn usage into income.

None of this is new. What has changed is the volume.

You can still build hype, but sustaining a business depends on solid infrastructure and on accurate data doing its job quietly in the background.

Learnabout the flow of music rights

Build for what endures

What won’t change in 2026 is this: the tools will keep evolving, and the headlines will keep shifting.

But the artists and labels that last aren’t the ones chasing every prediction or shift in the market. They’re building around what endures: strong music, clear brand identity, trusted relationships, solid infrastructure, and real community.

Looking ahead isn’t always about predicting what’s next.

Sometimes it’s about remembering what still works — and having the discipline to ignore the shiny new toys and stick with what consistently works.