Discography, business overtakes cinema box office for the first time

Olly 'beats' Checco Zalone. For the first time, revenues from recorded music, here in Italia, exceed those of the film box office. The year 2025 was truly a banner year for the Italian discography: the first in history in which the winner of Sanremo - Olly, in fact - ended the year at the top of the charts Fimi Niq for both albums and singles, but also the eighth consecutive year of growth in the industry's turnover, at a higher percentage increase than the world average.

These figures emerge from the 2026 edition of the Ifpi Global Music Report, the bible of the music business. The overall context sees the recording industry in excellent health: world-wide, the sector stands at $31.7 billion in sales, up 6.7 per cent year-on-year. This is the 11th consecutive year of growth. Streaming accounts for 69.6 per cent of recorded music revenues and paid music for 52.4 per cent. Worldwide there are 837 million premium users, up 9.6 per cent on 2024.

Italy, if possible, is going even stronger: discography revenues totalled 513.3 million, up 10.7% on the previous year. It is historic to overtake the film box office, which, as of 2025, had collected 496.5 million, but it is also true that Buen camino, the Checco Zalone blockbuster, biggest Italia success of all time, was released at Christmas and took its own long tail of box office into the first two months of 2026. And also that the exploitation of films, with streaming, nowadays travels mainly on home entertainment, which is impossible to census in the same detail as Box Office because the big American platforms do not provide their vertically organised turnover per country.

Returning to discography, Italia just missed out on the Top 10 richest music markets in the world, dominated by the US, Japan, the UK and China. Mexico took 10th place, but Italy's 11th place still means the fourth largest European market (after the UK, Germany and France) and third in the EU.

The exploit in Italia is obviously attributable to the performance of streaming, which in Italy is worth 340.5 million and grew by 9.6 per cent on 2024, mainly thanks to the premium segment (234.3 million) characterised by an increase of 14.1 per cent. The reasons for the growth, rather than the price increase of subscriptions to Spotify last September, are to be found in the fact that the premium market here in our country is far from mature. In 2025, there will in fact be 9 million premium subscribers in Italy, 12% more than in the previous year. The penetration rate, however, still stands at 15%, far behind more mature markets such as Germany (37%) and France (26%). "An important hand in the free-premium conversion," emphasises Pico Cibelli, ceo of Warner Music Italy, "was given by Spotify, blocking numerous pirated accounts. A move that brought several users who previously enjoyed the entire offer abusively into line. Italy's low penetration rate, at the same time, offers important growth margins for the coming years'.