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ITALY landed at no.10 on the list of the world’s top 10 markets generating music revenues of 392.4 million last year. 

With the explosive growth of so many different markets due to the gradual recovery of many economies from the pandemic, countless different areas such as tech, investing and travel saw explosive and unprecedented growth. The Italian music market saw such explosive growth last year that it managed to land itself 10th in the world’s top 10 markets. This blog will outline some of the wild statistics to put into perspective just how much growth it experienced.  

Music revenues recorded by Italy grew by 27.8% in 2021, reaching 332 million euro (up by 72 million euros compared to 2020. This is according to FIMI, an organization representing Italy’s recorded music industry. The public release of Italy’s music revenues for 2021 also correlated to the March 22nd release of the IFPI’s global music report, revealing Italy is the 10th biggest music market globally.  

Despite many different subscription models based streaming platforms for media increasing in price recently such as Spotify and Netflix, paid subscription streaming revenues still increase by a whopping 35.6% in 2021, topping 141.7 million euro, compared to 104.5 million euro in 2020. The totality of the streaming segment, this including revenue from video, paid and ad-supported streams soared to 208.4 million euro, a 24.6% year-on-year increase from 2020.  

You’d think with the technological advancements of music in the last 5 decades, from cassette to CD to Streaming that physical forms of music would be somewhat obsolete. Yet, another area of the music industry that saw unprecedented and arguably counterintuitive growth was the physical music product industry in Italy. CD sales grew 10.6%, vinyl sales rocketed up 78% and even the archaic cassette tapes saw a 245% year-on-year increase from 2021 (all the way to 686,000 euro. Overall, physical music media sales increase by 37.87% (from 40 million euro in 2020 to 55.2 million euro in 2021).  

Along with this increase in physical music sales, there was a substantial growth in streaming services too, with Italian consumers spending over 19 hours a week listening to music, almost half of them on premium accounts, despite the general increase in price for subscription streaming services. Italy’s recorded music revenues publication correlates to statistics released by FIMI in January, showing every album in the top 20 domestic album chart was local artists, including a first time ever of the full top 10 of its singles charts for the year being comprised of mainly Italian acts.  

There’s no doubt it has been an incredible year for the Italian music industry, with FIMI mentioning ‘This was a particularly strong year for the Italian music market’. Due to cultural and musical innovation and a country passionate not just about music but about their own music too, the Italian music industry will likely see a continued efficient growth and go from strength to strength over the next few years. 


The continued rise in screaming has left Artists losing out on millions of unclaimed royalties due to errors in metadata . Music matching technology can help music rights organisations address this issue and ensure accuracy.

There is a huge discrepancy between the music being played and the royalties being paid. Much of this can be attributed to bad, unorganised and inconsistent music metadata.

The Matching Engine uses automated parameters to identify and match data. A foundation of Azure and Databricks technology provides the ability to process and transform data from various streaming platforms and in different formats at scale.