The IMS Electronic Music Business Report put the global electronic music industry at $15.1 billion for 2025, a rise of 7 percent on the $14.2 billion it recorded for 2024. Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Research presented the twelfth edition at IMS Ibiza on 22 April 2026, counting recordings, publishing, streaming services, festivals and clubs, creator tools, merchandise, sponsorship and brand spending, and leaving out the travel and hospitality money that collects around an event. One line from the report has travelled much further than the valuation. Afro house rose from tenth place in 2023 to second in 2025, and that has been repeated since April as proof that afro house is now the second biggest sound in dance music. The ranking counts searches on Splice, a sample subscription service producers use to build tracks. It describes what is being made, and the entry sitting above it in the same table is trap.
What second place actually ranks
Splice sells sample packs and loops on subscription, so its search log records what producers typed while looking for material. The report treats that as a forward indicator, on the reasoning that a producer searching for a sound in March is releasing it later in the year. Afro house finished 2025 with 1.3 million searches on the platform, an increase of 82 percent, behind trap on 1.4 million. Trap heading a table that gets quoted as a dance music ranking is the plainest evidence of what the table holds. Producers making beats for rappers use the same library.
None of this makes the growth imaginary. A sound climbing eight places in two years inside the tool producers open first is a real signal, and it tends to arrive before the records do. What it measures is supply. The claim that circulated was about demand, and those are separate questions with separate evidence behind them.
The sales chart says something else again
Tech house was the top-selling genre on Beatport in 2025 and still led the store's mid-year review in 2026. Beatport counts what DJs buy, which sits closer to a dancefloor than a sample search does and is still not a dancefloor. A DJ buying a record is placing a bet on playing it out. Whether that bet paid is nowhere in the purchase data.
Two of the most quoted genre rankings in electronic music therefore describe two stages of the same production line. One counts raw material going in. The other counts finished records going out to the people who might play them. Neither counts a night.
What eight city calendars carry
Our index sits one step further down that line, at the point closest to a door. We count scheduled events, so a sound tag on a listing is a promoter telling a reader what a room will sound like on a particular night. Across the 11,935 listings we analysed at 3,610 venues in eight cities, captured on 17 August 2026, tech house is the most common sound tag in five of them: London, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles and São Paulo. Tech house carries 349 tagged listings across the whole index. Afro house carries 134.
Roughly two and a half to one is a long way from second place, and it puts our calendar nearer to Beatport's sales chart than to Splice's search log. That is the ordering you would expect from three measurements taken at three points on the same pipeline, each one further from the studio and closer to the room. The gap between the first measurement and the last is the months it takes a sound to travel that distance, which is the useful thing a search ranking tells you and the one thing the headline dropped.
The rise is real and it has an address
The ratio matters less than where those 134 afro house listings sit. London holds 62, New York 32 and Lisbon 26, so three cities account for about nine in ten of them. Los Angeles has 12 and São Paulo has two. Berlin, Tokyo and Paris carry none among their leading tags at all, and Lisbon is the one city in our index where afro house is the most common sound tag we hold, ahead of tech house.
A single global ranking reports one number for a sound our calendar finds heavily in three cities and hardly anywhere else. Both readings can be accurate at once. The average is of little use to anyone booking a room, because no room programmes an average, and a promoter in Lisbon and a promoter in Tokyo are reading the same headline about completely different weeks. The same pattern showed up when we counted where a city's calendar actually sits, and it is the reason we publish city by city rather than as one total.
Reading a ranking for what it measures
Our tags come from the sources we index, so coverage varies between cities and this counts Dizko coverage of a calendar rather than every event in a city. Paris carries seven sound tags in total across its listings, which is too thin to support any claim about Paris, and we would rather say that than fill the gap. The full dataset, its window and its stated limits are published at the market data file for anyone who wants to check the counts.
Every one of these numbers is honest about a different thing, and the trouble starts when a figure gets carried across the gap between them. Beatport's chart was read as a verdict on music rather than on a store when it set its rule on AI-generated tracks. Splice's search log has now been read as a popularity ranking. For a promoter the practical question is narrower and easier to answer: whether the sound rising in the sample libraries has reached the rooms in your city yet, or whether you would be first. Those are both good positions. They are not the same position, and a global second place cannot tell you which one you are in.