Music Without Borders: The World’s Biggest Artists and Why We Listen Beyond English
Pop stations picked for you
The main global ranking
Every year IFPI compiles the Global Artist Chart, a list of the world's most popular artists based on streaming, sales and downloads across all countries. The ranking for 2025:
1. Taylor Swift 2. Stray Kids 3. Drake 4. The Weeknd 5. Bad Bunny 6. Kendrick Lamar 7. Morgan Wallen 8. Sabrina Carpenter 9. Billie Eilish 10. Lady Gaga
Taylor Swift took the title for the sixth time and the fourth year running. IFPI also named her album The Life of a Showgirl the world's biggest-selling album of 2025.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
The real story isn't No. 1
Look at second and fifth place. Korean group Stray Kids rose to No. 2, their best result ever and their third straight year in the top five. Puerto Rico's Bad Bunny, who sings mostly in Spanish, jumped from 20th to 5th.
In other words, two of the planet's five most popular artists don't make music in English.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
Even in the US, English is losing ground
Analytics company Luminate measured which languages songs are in on US streaming:
- English's share fell to 86% in Q1 2026 (88.1% a year earlier);
- Spanish hit a record 9.5%, nearly one stream in ten;
- Korean held at 1.1%;
- all other languages combined grew to 3.4%.
In early 2026 Bad Bunny was the second most popular artist in the US. For a market that exported music to the rest of the world for decades, that's a notable shift.
Hear global hits on air
You don't need to speak the languages to hear what this music without borders sounds like:
Global pop
- .977 Hitz – an American pop channel with chart hits.
- LOS 40 España – Spain's leading hits station, where English and Spanish pop play side by side.
Latin and reggaeton
- La Mega Medellín – Medellín is considered one of the capitals of reggaeton.
- Chocolate FM – Latin and urban music from Málaga.
K-pop and Asia
- Listen.moe Kpop – non-stop K-pop.
- SBS PopAsia – pop from Korea, Japan, China and across Asia.
Afrobeats
- WDR COSMO Afrobeats – the Afrobeats channel of Germany's WDR.
- LagosJump Radio – a Nigerian station with current African music.
We'll know who tops IFPI's 2026 ranking early next year. But the trend is clear: you no longer have to sing in English to reach the global top ten.
Sources: IFPI, Luminate.