Norway’s music life combines near-universal streaming access with substantial live attendance and widespread amateur participation. In 2024, 95% of Norwegians streamed music, while 63% paid for a music-streaming subscription, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024. The figures below place those habits alongside radio, concerts, instruments, music rights and support for creators.
Contents
- Streaming and music discovery
- Media habits around music
- Concerts and cultural participation
- Playing instruments and school bands
- Music rights and the creator economy
- Distributions, scholarships and collective organisations
Streaming and music discovery
Streaming is the dominant way people in Norway access recorded music. The TONO Annual Report 2024 reports that 95% of Norwegians streamed music in 2024. Paid access was also common: 63% paid for a music-streaming subscription. Almost 7 out of 10 Norwegians used Spotify during the year.
YouTube remained an important music platform, although its use for music in Norway fell to 61% in 2024, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024. These figures describe platform use during 2024; they do not measure listening minutes, subscription revenue or the number of tracks played.
Discovery still extends beyond on-demand platforms. Radio was the single most important source for discovering new music for 19% of Norwegians in 2024, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024. That makes radio a meaningful discovery channel alongside streaming services, particularly for listeners who encounter music through programming rather than personal playlists.
The underlying TONO survey has a long-running series behind it. TONO’s 2024 Polaris Digital Music Survey was the eighth time the survey had been run since 2014. The survey-series count is useful context when reading the 2024 platform and discovery figures: they belong to an established recurring research programme rather than a one-off measurement.
Media habits around music
The wider media environment helps explain how music reaches Norwegian audiences. The SSB Norwegian Media Barometer 2024 interviewed 3,340 people and recorded a 55.9% response rate. It found that Norwegians spent an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes online per day in 2024. People aged 16–19 spent an average of 7.5 hours online per day.
Social platforms were also deeply embedded in daily media use. Eighty percent of the population used social media daily, and average daily time on social media was 1 hour and 53 minutes, according to the SSB Norwegian Media Barometer 2024. Fifty-seven percent got daily news from social media.
Traditional and digital media coexisted. On an average day in 2024, 15% of the population read a printed newspaper, while 58% read online newspapers. Linear television reached 46%, radio reached 43%, and 9 out of 10 people in Norway had access to at least one streaming service.
| Daily or household media measure | Norway figure | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Online time | 4 hours 35 minutes | 2024 |
| Social-media use | 80% | 2024 |
| Social-media time | 1 hour 53 minutes | 2024 |
| Radio listening | 43% | 2024 |
| Access to at least one streaming service | 9 out of 10 people | 2024 |
These SSB measures are broader than music alone, so they should not be read as music-listening shares. They show the channels and screen time competing for attention around music consumption.
Concerts and cultural participation
Live music remains a large part of cultural participation in Norway. The SSB Norwegian Cultural Barometer reports concert attendance at 60% of the population in 2025. Festival attendance was 32% in the same year. The figures refer to participation in the population, not to the number of tickets sold or the number of events attended by each person.
The 2025 Cultural Barometer also provides useful cultural comparisons. Cinema attendance was 62%, museum attendance 46%, public-library attendance 49%, and sports-event attendance 49%. Theatre, musical or revue attendance was 37%, while exhibition attendance was 26%.
Opera attendance reached 8% in 2025, and ballet or dance-performance attendance reached 14%, according to the SSB Norwegian Cultural Barometer. Those figures describe distinct cultural activities and should not be combined into a single overall attendance rate.
The economics of live music are also reflected in TONO’s tariff data. Oslo Economics found that TONO’s total remuneration from Norwegian concert organisers in 2023 was 2.6% of total concert revenues, as reported in the TONO Annual Report 2024. TONO’s concert tariff top tier was scheduled to rise to 2.5% of ticket revenues from April 2025 and further to 3% from 2026. Concert organisers with annual subsidies below NOK 50,000 were scheduled to be excluded from the tariff calculation base from 2027.
The policy change has a defined approval history. TONO’s new distribution principles received 93.2% support at the extraordinary annual meeting on 28 August 2024, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024.
Playing instruments and school bands
Music participation in Norway extends beyond listening. In 2025, 18% of the population played an instrument during leisure time, unchanged from 2023, according to the SSB article “Hvor mange spiller i korps?”. Among 9–15-year-olds, 26% played an instrument during leisure time. The age-specific figure is therefore higher than the population-wide figure, although the two measures cover different age groups.
Among instrument players in 2025, 49% played string instruments, 36% played keyboard instruments, 11% played brass instruments and 8% played woodwind instruments, according to SSB. The categories describe the instrument types reported by players and are not presented here as mutually exclusive shares; one person may play more than one type.
Participation also varied by sex in the SSB figures. In 2025, 22% of men played an instrument during leisure time, compared with 15% of women. Among people who sang or played music in a group, 29% of women played in a corps or janitsjar orchestra, compared with 17% of men.
Young people were especially represented in corps and janitsjar orchestras. Among Norwegians aged 9–15 who played music in a group, 51% played in a corps or janitsjar orchestra in 2025. Across people who sang or played music in a group, the corresponding share was 23% according to the same SSB source.
School-band membership rose across the three reported years. Norwegian school-band membership reached 35,437 in 2025, compared with 34,887 in 2024 and 34,570 in 2023, according to SSB. These are membership counts, not unique national participants across all music organisations.
Music rights and the creator economy
TONO’s membership and registration figures show the size of the rights-management system behind Norwegian music. TONO gained 2,041 new members in 2024 and reported 43,272 rights holders at 31 December 2024. It also registered 930,000 new works during 2024, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024.
The reported member mix remained uneven by gender. Among members with personal identification numbers, excluding publishers and members without a personal identification number, new members in 2024 were 22% women and 78% men. The corresponding all-member mix was 25% women and 75% men.
TONO distributed NOK 741.6 million in total in 2024, including distributions abroad. NOK 374.8 million went to members. Member distributions were NOK 51.3 million higher than in 2023, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024. These are distribution figures, not a measure of total Norwegian music-industry turnover.
Artificial intelligence was addressed through a specific registration policy. TONO launched AI registration guidelines in October 2024. Works using AI as a tool could be registered when human creative effort was involved, while fully AI-generated works could not be registered, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024.
International administration also appears in the rights figures. NCB collected DKK 94 million in 2024, equal to NOK 146.5 million. Its Norwegian-market remuneration totalled DKK 10.6 million, or NOK 16.5 million. NCB’s 2024 profit was DKK 112,000, or NOK 175,000, and its equity at 31 December 2024 was DKK 75.47 million, or NOK 117.7 million.
Distributions, scholarships and collective organisations
NCB’s Norwegian-market revenues were DKK 10,570,485, or NOK 16.5 million, in 2024. The corresponding figures were DKK 12,571,497, or NOK 18.9 million, in 2023, and DKK 14,250,941, or NOK 20.1 million, in 2022, according to the TONO Annual Report 2024.
NCB distributed DKK 72,144,091, or NOK 112.5 million, in 2024. Of that distribution, DKK 14,630,324, or NOK 22.8 million, went to TONO members. TONO members received DKK 13,810,181, or NOK 20.8 million, in 2023, and DKK 15,562,704, or NOK 22.0 million, in 2022.
Other organisations broaden the picture. Norwaco is owned by 37 member organisations, including TONO, and recognised NOK 428 million in remuneration in 2024. NORCODE was established in 2007 and has helped establish around 20 collective-management organisations in developing countries. IFPI Norge has 23 members. IFPI International represents 8,000 members in more than 70 countries; IFPI Norge runs Topplista, verifies and issues official gold and platinum trophies, and prepares market statistics.
Support for creators was another measurable part of TONO’s 2024 activity. TONO awarded NOK 13.74 million in scholarships through three main rates: 11 scholarships of NOK 120,000, 43 scholarships of NOK 60,000 and 324 scholarships of NOK 30,000. It also awarded 8 extra scholarships and recorded 19 joint-award cases for creative collaborations.
The Young Talents scholarship distributed NOK 1.762 million in 2024. It gave 13 awards of NOK 10,000, 54 awards of NOK 8,000 and 200 awards of NOK 6,000. Combined scholarship spending was NOK 15.5 million in 2024, compared with NOK 14.1 million in 2023 and NOK 17.1 million in 2022. The corresponding scholarship counts were 386, 430 and 604; Young Talents counts were 267, 390 and 351.
Together, these figures show a Norwegian music system with broad digital reach, substantial live participation, active amateur music-making and a sizeable rights and support infrastructure. The measures cover different years, populations and definitions, so each percentage or amount is best read with its stated source and measurement period.