Music's Winners & Losers Of 2024

Five categories, five champs, five chumps.

When I landed in Ft. Lauderdale on a random weekend in October, it quickly dawned on me that something unusual was happening. There were no cars left at the airport rental counter, despite the fact that I’d made a reservation weeks earlier. Flights had been double their usual price. And the hotel I stayed at was flooded with tween girls in sparkly costumes.

That last part finally clicked everything into place for me. The scarcity, the prices, and the crowds weren’t the result of a pending hurricane, or the Super Bowl, or Halloween, but something perhaps even more powerful: Taylor Swift. The superstar songstress turned out to be playing three nights at Hard Rock Stadium in nearby Miami Gardens. And suddenly all those reports of Swift’s impact on local economies became personal.

So it should come as no surprise that Swift is music’s biggest winner of the year. In 2024, her Eras Tour grossed over $1 billion, easily the top tally of any artists on the planet, and more than double second-place Coldplay’s total.

Swift also headlines my annual list of music’s biggest winners and losers. This year, I’m getting a little more granular. Rather than just generically selecting three champs and three chumps, I’m picking one winner and one loser in each of five categories: artist, label, live, streaming, and M&A.

Read on for my full list, tune in to hear me debate picks with my pal Dan Runcie (via Trapital podcast parts one and two), and/or feel free to submit your own—I’ll gladly get into it with you in the comments section here. Envelopes, please…

Artist

Winner: Taylor Swift

Probably the easiest pick of the bunch. Not only did she pace the planet in touring dollars, she’s also Spotify’s most-streamed artist of the year and her Tortured Poets Department topped the album category.

Loser: Diddy

Few have lost so much so fast. The hip-hop impresario went from billionaire bon vivant to disgraced inmate in less than a year; he’s headed for trial in spring of 2025 on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Even in the event of a rumored potential pardon from Donald Trump, it’s hard to imagine the general public getting behind any sort of actual comeback for the now-despised mogul.

Streaming

Winner: Kendrick Lamar

There’s a consensus that Kendrick bested Drake in their war of words, and although Drake remains the more-streamed artist, Kendrick is now an international commercial force in a way he wasn’t before 2024. His devastating diss track “Not Like Us” was Apple Music’s most-streamed song of the year. The strong performance helped him earn a Super Bowl Halftime Show headliner nod, which should pour more rocket fuel on his numbers.