Technology
A Visual Breakdown of Global Music Consumption
Article/Editing:
A Visual Breakdown of Global Music Consumption
To maximize any chance of success in the music business, aspiring artists must gain an understanding of how music is consumed and how that is changing alongside technology.
This graphic from Athul Alexander highlights global music consumption habits. Data is from 2022 and is sourced from a survey of over 44,000 people from 22 countries by IFPI that asked people their primary mode for consuming music.
As of 2022, paid subscription services (i.e. Apple Music, Spotify) are the most preferred option for listeners, accounting for nearly one-fourth of main platform share.
| Rank | Service | Share | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paid Audio Streaming | 24% | Spotify, Apple Music |
| 2 | Video Streaming | 19% | YouTube |
| 3 | Radio | 17% | |
| 4 | Purchased Music | 10% | Vinyls, CDs, purchased digital albums |
| 5 | Ad-Supported Audio Streaming | 8% | Amazon, Deezer |
| 6 | Short-form Videos | 8% | TikTok |
| 7 | Social Media Videos | 5% | Facebook, Instagram |
| 8 | Live Music | 4% | concerts, livestreams |
| 9 | Other | 6% | music on TV, phone-to-phone transfers |
Short-form video platforms like TikTok, with an 8% share of primary music listeners, are a fast-growing medium. Several young artists have found initial success and traction using these platforms over the past few years.
And though video “killed the radio star,” it hasn’t killed listening to music on the radio. A healthy, 17% of respondents picked radio as their primary avenue for listening to music.
Streaming Supremacy and Virality
There’s no doubt that the internet has revolutionized how music is being consumed.
Including all video and music streaming, internet-based music consumption was the primary choice for 64% of respondents. That’s not even accounting for livestreams or music purchased through the internet.
| Platform | Share |
|---|---|
| Internet-based | 64% |
| Non-Internet Based | 37% |
This internet-heavy metric is being reflected on the business side as well, with 75% of the music industry’s revenues in the U.S. coming from streaming.
However, for artists, streaming revenue is usually the third-biggest earner after live performances and sales.
But utilizing streaming to its fullest potential keeps modern artists in the loop. For example, Beyoncé was one of the first artists to utilize streaming platforms to release an album completely unannounced in 2013, a marketing move that has been replicated many times since.
Source: IFPI
Data note: IFPI surveyed over 44,000 people from 22 countries, asking them about their primary mode of consuming music. They exclude India and China from their global figures to prevent the size of the population from influencing the global weighted average. Percentages may also not add up to 100 because of rounded figures.
This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.
Technology
Ranked: The Smartest AI Models, by IQ
Some of the smartest AI models are already surpassing human intelligence, with one model falling in the “genius” category of IQ.
Ranked: The Smartest AI Models, by IQ
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest AI of them all?
Artificial intelligence is designed to be intelligent. But how do today’s leading AI models stack up in human IQ terms, and which ones are the smartest?
This infographic ranks the smartest AI models based on their performance on the Mensa Norway IQ test, with data compiled by Tracking AI. The Mensa test is a widely recognized and highly difficult IQ exam used to evaluate human intelligence.
For context, the average human IQ score ranges from 90 to 110, while a score above 130 is typically considered genius-level.
AI with Genius-Level IQ
Topping the chart is OpenAI’s text-only o3 model, scoring a 135 on the Mensa IQ test, which puts it in the “genius” category. As a part of ChatGPT, it’s also among the world’s most popular AI tools.
| Model Name | Mensa Norway IQ Test Score |
|---|---|
| OpenAI o3 | 135 |
| Claude-4 Sonnet | 127 |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Exp. | 126 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp. | 124 |
| OpenAI o4 mini | 122 |
| Claude-4 Opus | 120 |
| Grok-3 Think | 112 |
| DeepSeek R1 | 106 |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 105 |
| OpenAI o1 Pro | 102 |
| DeepSeek V3 | 100 |
| GPT4.5 Preview | 99 |
| Grok-3 | 97 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp. (Vision) | 96 |
| GPT-4o | 93 |
| OpenAI o4 mini high | 92 |
| Claude-3.7 (Vision) | 91 |
| Bing Copilot | 86 |
| Mistral | 85 |
| OpenAI o1 Pro (Vision) | 83 |
| OpenAI o3 (Vision) | 72 |
| Llama-3.2 (Vision) | 70 |
| GPT-4o (Vision) | 63 |
| Grok-3 Think (Vision) | 60 |
Anthropic’s Claude-4 Sonnet and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking follow closely with IQ scores of 127 and 126, respectively. Furthermore, new iterations like the Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o4 mini both scored over 120, above the average human IQ range.
Overall, these high scores prove that leading AI models are now operating at high levels of intelligence, with some even surpassing the smartest human minds.
However, what’s more surprising is that all of the top 10 smartest AI models are text-only models that cannot read or process images.
The IQ Contrast Between Text and Vision AI Models
Based on IQ scores, it seems like reasoning through words is still a much stronger suit for AI than interpreting and solving visual images and puzzles.
The bottom five AI models by IQ scores are all multimodal models with the ability to read and process images. In particular, OpenAI’s GPT-4o (Vision) and xAI’s Grok-3 Think (Vision) landed far below the human average, scoring 63 and 60 on the test, respectively.
Still, the results are telling: AI isn’t just mirroring human intelligence, it’s even outscoring us in certain areas of cognition and reasoning.
Learn More on the Voronoi App 
See what humans are using AI for in 2025, in this infographic on the Voronoi app.
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