Australia’s country music industry has crossed $1 billion AUD in annual value for the first time, according to the Country Music Association of Australia’s Valuing Australian Country Music 2025 census, released in July 2025. Depending on which figure in the report you cite, the sector sits between $1.09 billion and $1.11 billion for the 2024 to 2025 financial year, up from roughly $620 to $690 million in 2019. Either way, that is a jump of more than three quarters in six years, for a genre that spent decades getting treated as a niche.
Live music did most of the heavy lifting. The census puts live performance revenue at $560 million, just over half the industry’s total, and up 93 percent since 2019. Country shows drew 3.26 million live attendees over the period, anchored by fixtures like the Tamworth Country Music Festival, the genre’s biggest annual gathering in the country.
Streaming is the other half of the story. Spotify’s own data, cited in the CMAA census, shows country music streams in Australia up 115 percent since 2023. That has pushed Australia to the third largest country music market on the platform worldwide, and one of the fastest growing. The country also posted the highest share of new country listeners of any market Spotify tracks, and ranks second globally for listeners under 25 streaming the genre.
Rolling Stone Australia’s own breakdown of the boom named Luke Combs as the country’s most streamed country artist in 2024, fresh off sold out stadium dates, a sign the growth is not just a local phenomenon but tied into a broader audience for country coming out of the US as well.
For a genre this is still routinely written off as background noise at best, the numbers say otherwise. Country music in Australia is now a billion dollar industry built on the same two things most durable media businesses run on: people showing up in person, and people streaming on their own time. ByteSize Network will be watching where it goes from here.
Sources: CMAA, Valuing Australian Country Music 2025; Countrytown; Rolling Stone Australia.
