Music Streaming Growth Slows Sharply in Québec as Catalog Tracks Take Half of Listening

Music streaming is still growing in Québec, but the explosive phase is clearly slowing. New data from the Institut de la statistique du Québec shows that listeners generated 31.9 billion on-demand music streams in 2025, up only 3% year over year. That compares with growth of 12% in 2024 and 16% in 2023.

Key Takeaways

Québec generated 31.9 billion on-demand music streams in 2025.
Streaming growth slowed to 3%, down from 12% in 2024 and 16% in 2023.
Québec artists accounted for 7.1% of total listening.
Tracks more than five years old captured 50% of all streams.
New releases from the previous 18 months represented only 28% of listening.
The figures show why independent artists increasingly need long-term catalog strategies rather than relying only on release-week attention.

Listener using a smartphone and headphones for music streaming

Streaming is still growing, just much more slowly

The Observatoire de la culture et des communications, part of the Institut de la statistique du Québec, analyzed Luminate data covering on-demand music consumption in the province. The headline result is 31.9 billion streams in 2025, equal to roughly 614 million streams per week.

The total is enormous, but the direction of travel is more interesting than the raw number. Growth fell to 3% in 2025 after 12% the previous year and 16% in 2023. The rest of Canada also slowed, growing 6% in 2025 compared with 10% in 2024 and 15% in 2023.

That does not mean streaming is collapsing. It suggests that a mature market behaves differently from an early-growth market. Once most active music consumers already use streaming, future gains depend less on converting people to the format and more on price, engagement, new tiers and the amount of time listeners spend inside the services.

Half of all listening now goes to tracks older than five years

One of the most striking findings concerns catalog music. In 2025, 50% of streams in Québec came from tracks released more than five years earlier. That share has been rising steadily since 2022.

By comparison, newer songs, defined in the study as tracks released within the previous 18 months, represented only 28% of total listening.

This reinforces a broader shift in streaming economics. A release is no longer valuable only during its first few weeks. Songs can remain discoverable for years through search, playlists, algorithmic recommendations, social media resurgences and artist catalog exploration.

For independent artists, this can be encouraging. A track that fails to explode on release day is not necessarily finished. Streaming gives older songs multiple chances to find an audience.

Québec artists remain a small part of local streaming

Artists from Québec represented 7.1% of total streams in the province in 2025. The figure was 7.0% in 2024, 7.5% in 2023 and 8.0% in 2022, meaning local listening share has remained relatively stable but below 10%.

Only one Québec act appeared among the 20 most-streamed artists in the market: Les Cowboys Fringants, ranked 12th. Charlotte Cardin, Souldia, Alexandra Stréliski and Céline Dion were among the leading Québec artists further down the ranking.

The data highlights the scale of international competition. Streaming removes geographic barriers for listeners, which means local artists compete directly with global superstars inside the same recommendation systems and playlists.

English-language music dominates listening

The Institut de la statistique du Québec also found that 83.2% of streamed tracks were in English. French-language recordings represented 9.8%, while other languages and instrumental or non-language audio accounted for 7.1%.

None of the ten most-streamed tracks in Québec in 2025 was by a Québec artist or performed in French. That creates an important cultural-policy question: streaming gives listeners unprecedented access to music, but global recommendation systems do not automatically guarantee visibility for local-language artists.

For artists, the practical lesson is that local identity alone is not enough to secure discovery. Metadata, playlist positioning, audience engagement, collaborations and direct fan communication all matter.

For independent artists: treat every release as a catalog asset. Streaming data increasingly rewards songs that continue finding listeners months and years after release, not only tracks that win a large opening week.

Montréal dominates the province’s streaming activity

The concentration is geographic as well as musical. Around 71% of Québec streams came from the Montréal census metropolitan area, including 55% from the city itself and 16% from surrounding areas such as Laval and Longueuil.

The Québec City metropolitan area accounted for 9%, while the Québec portion of Ottawa-Gatineau represented around 3%.

For independent labels and artists planning local promotion, this data can influence where to focus advertising, live activity, press outreach and partnerships. Streaming may be global, but audience density still matters when turning listeners into ticket buyers and long-term fans.

A slower market changes the growth strategy

When a streaming market grows by double digits every year, platforms and rightsholders can benefit from a rapidly expanding pool of listening. When growth falls to low single digits, competition for each listener becomes more intense.

That shift can encourage streaming services to focus more heavily on retention, higher-priced subscription tiers, fan monetization, video, social features and other products that increase revenue without relying entirely on new users.

For artists, the same logic applies. Sustainable growth increasingly comes from keeping listeners engaged across a catalog, converting them into followers and building direct relationships rather than chasing isolated spikes in streams.

Physical music tells a second story

The report also tracks physical formats. CD sales in Québec fell from nearly 13 million units in 2004 to about 500,000 in 2025. Vinyl moved in the opposite direction, reaching roughly 400,000 units in 2025 and growing 311% since 2015.

That does not threaten streaming’s dominance, but it shows that physical formats can still play a role in fandom and artist economics. Vinyl in particular has become less of a mass-consumption format and more of a premium product for dedicated listeners.

The combination of slower streaming growth and resilient vinyl demand supports a broader industry trend: the next phase of music growth may depend increasingly on deeper fan spending rather than simply generating more plays.

What artists should watch next

Québec is only one market, so its numbers should not be projected automatically onto every country. Still, the pattern is useful. Mature streaming markets eventually hit a point where user growth slows, catalog listening rises and the fight for attention becomes more important than the fight to introduce consumers to streaming itself.

For independent artists, that makes catalog health, repeat listening and audience retention increasingly important performance indicators.

A music career built only around constant new releases can become exhausting. The data suggests another path: make each release easier to rediscover, connect songs to a coherent artist identity and keep older tracks active through playlists, content and live performance.