Advertising statistics 2026: music, events and e-commerce

Published by Multiloop (adsforsales.com). Last updated 2 November 2026.

How to use and cite this page

This page collects advertising statistics that matter to three kinds of advertiser: music artists and labels, live event organisers and ticket sellers, and Shopify and e-commerce brands. It is built for journalists, PR teams and marketers who need a number with a source beside it.

Method. Every statistic links to the page it was taken from. Where possible that is the original study, platform report or regulator filing, not a blog that repeats it. Each entry shows the publisher, the publication date and, where the source states it, the sample size and the market covered. Figures that could only be found in a secondary source are marked "secondary". Nothing here is estimated or rounded beyond what the source gives. All figures were checked on 2 November 2026; prices and platform benchmarks change, so the date matters.

What is left out. Statistics with no traceable source, figures older than 2022 unless they are the latest available, and any number from a vendor's marketing page that is not backed by a published method.

To cite this page: "Advertising statistics 2026: music, events and e-commerce, Multiloop (adsforsales.com), updated 2 November 2026." To cite an individual figure, cite the original source linked beside it; this page is a guide to the sources, not a replacement for them.

Headline numbers

These 20 figures tell one story in five steps: more things compete for attention than ever, the people advertising them run on thin margins, their audience lives on social, the creative decides whether an ad sells, and AI can now make any ad without knowing which one will. Each row links to its source; the full tables below give sample sizes and context. Figures marked (secondary) were read in a report that cites the original.

Music artists and releases: advertising and marketing statistics

Music is the most crowded attention market in advertising. Around 106,000 new tracks reach streaming services every day, and most never pass 1,000 streams. This section collects verified figures on that scale, on what artists and labels earn and spend, on what paid ads and platform tools deliver, and on how fans find and follow music. Every figure links to the page where it was read. Where a figure comes from a vendor, a platform or a commissioned study, the table says so.

Streaming scale and the attention problem

Industry revenue and artist earnings

Marketing spend and independent artist budgets

Paid ads for music: Spotify tools and vendor benchmarks

TikTok and music discovery

Fan behaviour and conversion

Music fans' media habits

Notes and disagreements

• The 106,000 tracks a day figure is verified through two outlets that cite Luminate's 2025 Year-End Music Report (Music Business Worldwide and Hypebot). Luminate's own report page shows only topic headings, and the PDF could not be read. Cite it as "Luminate, via Music Business Worldwide" until the PDF page is checked.
• The 88% figure is worded as "fewer than 1,000 streams" by Music Business Worldwide and as "1,000 or fewer" by Hypebot. Use "around 1,000 streams or fewer" unless the Luminate wording is confirmed.
• UK market size differs by measure. BPI reports £1.57 billion of trade revenue for 2025. Ofcom reports £2.45 billion of consumer spend on recorded music. Do not set one against the other without naming the measure.
• Ditto Music reports two different 43% figures. 43% do not know how to pitch for editorial playlists, and 43% of those who pitched secured a placement. Quote them separately.
• The Ditto sample is Ditto's own distribution customers, not all independent artists. Treat it as a vendor survey.
• Both TikTok and Luminate reports were commissioned by TikTok. Name that when quoting them.
• The Spotify Marquee study (2022) was run by Spotify on 10 releases. The Showcase "6x" figure (2023) has no stated method. Both are platform claims, not independent audits.
• Vendor ad benchmarks for music (cost per stream, per pre-save, per follower) are scarce and rarely state a sample. Only two clearly labelled figures are included.
• Spotify's Loud & Clear 2026 page did not give a count of artists with 1 million or more monthly listeners.

Top five quotable figures

• About 106,000 new tracks a day were delivered to streaming services in 2025 (Luminate, via Music Business Worldwide, 2026).
• 88% of tracks had around 1,000 streams or fewer in 2025 (Luminate, via Hypebot, 2026).
• 84% of songs that entered the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 had gone viral on TikTok first (TikTok and Luminate, 2025).
• 74% of independent artists earned under $1,000 from music in 2025 (Ditto Music survey of 5,039 artists, 2026).
• Spotify Marquee delivered 10x more listeners per dollar than similar social ads, on average (Spotify for Artists, 2022).

Live events, festivals and ticketing

UK live music is at record scale, but the money is moving to stadiums and tourists while grassroots venues, small festivals and younger fans feel the squeeze. Every figure below was read on the page linked. Entries marked secondary, vendor or B2B say so in the first column.

Market scale

Where tickets are discovered and bought

Paid advertising and event marketing

Audience, cost of living and staying in

Festivals

Clubs, nightlife and grassroots venues

Ticketing economics

Notes and disagreements

• Three "live music" revenue figures measure different things. LIVE reports £6.68bn consumer spend for 2024. UK Music reports £11.2bn music tourist spend for 2025, which includes travel, accommodation and indirect spend. Do not compare them directly.
• Music Venue Trust gives 53% (web launch page, January 2026) and 53.8% (annual report PDF) for venues with no profit. The PDF figure is more precise.
• Music Venue Trust press coverage says 175 towns with an estimated 25 million people lack regular touring. The annual report PDF says 175+ towns and about 35 million people. Quote the town count only, or name the source version.
• AIF counts moved during 2025: 39 by 10 June (Music Week), around 40 at mid-year (AIF Festival Forecast, via Ticket Tailor), 43 for the full year (AIF via UK Music, July 2026).
• CTS EVENTIM 2025 figures are in euros. Press conversions to dollars vary by outlet, so quote euros. Tickets sold, number of events and countries were not in the results release, and the company site did not expose the release. The figures come from a wire copy of the company release.
• Eventbrite's 258m "tickets issued" includes free tickets. It is not a paid ticket count.
• The Eventbrite Social Study covers 18 to 35s in the US and UK combined. Do not present it as UK only.
• The government figures (75% mark-up, resale shares) are modelling assumptions in an impact assessment, not measured market shares.
• Santander's Gigflation figure excludes VIP, resale and dynamic pricing, and it is bank-commissioned. The Dark Horse festival price comparison is an agency report seen only through a news site.
• Paid advertising data for events is thin. Only one agency case study and a general CPM comparison could be verified. Treat both as indicative.

Top five quotable figures

• 24.7 million music tourists spent a record £11.2bn at UK concerts and festivals in 2025 (UK Music, July 2026).
• Live Nation hosted 159 million fans and reported $25.2bn revenue in 2025 (Live Nation, February 2026).
• CTS EVENTIM passed EUR 3bn in revenue for the first time in 2025, with ticketing revenue up 11% to EUR 977.1m (CTS EVENTIM, March 2026).
• 43 UK festivals were cancelled, postponed or closed in 2025, after a record 78 in 2024 (AIF via UK Music, 2026).
• 53.8% of UK grassroots music venues made no profit in the year to 2025, and the sector margin averaged 2.5% (Music Venue Trust, January 2026).

Shopify and e-commerce: advertising statistics

Online shopping now takes close to three in every ten pounds spent in UK shops, and advertisers are following. This section covers market scale, ad spend, performance benchmarks, acquisition costs, TikTok Shop and social commerce, and shopper behaviour. Vendor benchmarks are labelled as such. Figures marked "secondary" were read on a page that cites the original.

Market scale: UK, EU and global e-commerce

Ad spend and channel mix

Performance benchmarks (vendor benchmarks)

Customer acquisition cost trends

TikTok Shop and social commerce

Consumer behaviour: checkout, mobile, returns and time online

Notes and disagreements

• Retail media forecasts differ by date. WARC's October 2026 forecast, via PPC Land, gives $202.1 billion for 2026. WARC's The Future of Commerce Media 2026, via Manifest Media in August 2026, gives $200.4 billion for 2026. Treat the later figure as the update.
• Eurostat reported 77% of EU internet users bought online in 2024 (news item of 20 Feb 2025) and 78% in 2025. These are consecutive years, not a conflict.
• Salesforce counts all UK shopper spend over Cyber Week (over £6 billion). Shopify counts only its merchants' global sales ($14.6 billion). Do not compare them.
• Shopify says its BFCM data is approximate and unaudited, and that methods can change year to year, so prior-year comparisons are not exact.
• Common Thread Collective's page contradicts itself on some channel shares (for example, TikTok is 2.5% in the text and 2.30% in the table; YouTube is 0.36% in the text and 0.90% in the table). The 58.71% Meta acquisition figure comes from the table. The text also says "two out of every three" dollars go to Meta, while the table totals about 61.4% for Meta. Quote with care.
• Lebesgue does not disclose its sample size. Its figures are medians by industry and AOV band.
• IAB UK's 2024 figures were restated under a new method with Oliver Wyman, so the 2025 report cannot be compared with older editions.
• The SimplicityDX and Accenture figures date from 2022. They are the only sources found for those specific claims.
• The ECDB UK share (65%) is a modelled estimate, not a TikTok-published number.
• Baymard says the 70.22% rate is an average of 50 studies. Its reasons list excludes the "just browsing" group.

Top five quotable figures

• Shopify merchants sold $14.6 billion over Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025, up 27% (Shopify, December 2025).
• 28.8% of GB retail sales were made online in September 2026 (ONS, October 2026).
• UK retail media ad spend reached £3.8 billion in 2025, up 18% (IAB UK with Oliver Wyman, March 2026).
• TikTok Shop UK sales over Black Friday to Cyber Monday 2025 rose 50% year on year (TikTok, December 2025).
• 70.22% of online carts are abandoned, on average across 50 studies (Baymard Institute, September 2025).

Ad formats and creative: what performs

Short-form video, creator content and fast creative refresh sit at the centre of paid social in 2026. This section covers format mix, short-form video, creators and UGC, carousels, creative fatigue and the weight of creative in results, and sound and hooks. Several of the most useful creative benchmarks come from vendors, so each is labelled with its sample. Figures marked "secondary" were read on a page that cites the original.

Video, static and placement: Reels, feed and carousels

Short-form video and video adoption

UGC and creators

Creative fatigue and how much creative drives results

Hooks, sound and copy

Notes and disagreements

• Short-form video tops HubSpot's ROI ranking (48.6%), but influencer marketers in Influencer Marketing Hub's survey rate long-form video (83%) just above short-form (80%) for effectiveness. The two questions differ: one asks about ROI across all marketing, the other asks about effectiveness in influencer work.
• TikTok use among businesses varies by sample: 40% in Wyzowl, 54.5% of brands in HubSpot, and under a quarter of teams in Wistia. Wistia's sample skews to B2B.
• Influencer Marketing Hub gives 72.22% for budget rises of 50% or more in one place and 70.20% in another. Only the 87.49% figure is used here.
• Socialinsider's page is internally inconsistent: it says overall engagement fell 24% year on year while its own figures show a drop of about 4%, and its date range runs to 2026. Only the 2025 format figures are quoted.
• Segwise, Webtonic and Billo are secondary pages that cite Curtis Howland, Interconnections, Skaler, Motion and AppsFlyer. The original reports were not opened. Motion's own benchmark page was not opened.
• Interconnections' fatigue benchmark rests on 15 DTC brands. Skaler's lifespan figure counts all inactive ads, which includes quick tests. Treat both as directional.
• The Nielsen and Catalina figure is from 2017, covers US consumer packaged goods and shows creative's share falling from 65% in 2006 to 49%. It is the most-quoted source for creative's share of sales, but the market has changed since.
• Kantar sells the LINK AI tool, so its results are vendor results. TikTok and Collabstr figures are platform or marketplace data.
• The IAB creator spend figure is a US projection for 2025 made in November 2025.
• Wyzowl's survey of 266 people is small. Quote it as a survey, not a market measure.

Top five quotable figures

• US creator economy ad spend is projected at $37 billion in 2025, up 26% (IAB, November 2025).
• Short-form video ranks first for ROI among marketers at 48.6% (HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing).
• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool (Wyzowl, 2026).
• 53% of Instagram ads ran on Reels in Q4 2025, up from 35% a year earlier (Sensor Tower via eMarketer).
• Creative contributed 49% of sales lift in Nielsen's study of nearly 500 consumer packaged goods campaigns, reported in 2017 (Nielsen and Nielsen Catalina Solutions via MarketingCharts).

Platform benchmarks 2025 to 2026

Digital advertising kept growing faster than the wider market in 2025. Social and video led in the US, UK and Europe. This section collects platform spend, ad cost benchmarks and audience figures from industry bodies, company filings and regulator reports. Vendor benchmarks are labelled as such. Secondary sources are labelled and name the original they cite.

Digital ad spend: US, UK and Europe

Meta ads: cost and performance benchmarks

TikTok ads and audience

Google Search and YouTube

Spotify Ads and audio

LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and X

UK and EU platform audiences

Notes and disagreements

• The IAB and PwC page does not say "US" in its text. The series is IAB's US internet advertising report. Treat the region label as US, but check IAB's report cover before quoting it as US only.
• UK total ad spend for 2025 differs by edition. The AA and WARC January 2026 release forecast £46.9bn, up 10.1% (WARC press release, 29 Jan 2026). The April 2026 refresh reports £46.7bn, up 6.4%, with search now excluding retail media. Do not mix the two.
• The AA and WARC forecast for 2026 has been revised up three times: £49.8bn, up 6.6% (April 2026), then £50.5bn, up 8.2% (Q1 edition), then £51.3bn, up 9.9% (Q2 edition, 29 Oct 2026). Always name the edition.
• IAB UK (£40.5bn, digital only, Oliver Wyman method) and AA and WARC (£46.7bn, all media) measure different things. IAB UK restated 2024 from H1 2025, so older IAB UK editions are not comparable.
• Lebesgue's country page is inconsistent. The body shows UK $11.81 and US $16.08. The page summary shows UK $10.85 and US $20.48. A music-marketing blog (Dynamoi, Apr 2026) repeats $10.85 for the UK and $20.48 for the US and names Lebesgue as its source. Cite the UK figure to Lebesgue directly and mention the range.
• Meta CPM benchmarks differ because the datasets differ. Triple Whale is a 2025 average ($14.19). Madgicx is a September 2026 median ($9.72). Do not compare them as like for like.
• WordStream Google Search CTR (6.64%) is a median for search campaigns in a US sample. It is not comparable with display or social CTR.
• Vendor sample sizes: Triple Whale and WordStream state them. Madgicx and Lebesgue do not.
• Alphabet's Q3 2026 release gives search growth (12%). Growth rates for YouTube and total Google advertising are not quoted here; compare the Q3 2025 and Q3 2026 values given.
• LinkedIn's quarter is Microsoft's fiscal Q3 2026 (January to March). A later quarter was not opened.
• X's EU figure is for April to June 2025 and is secondary. It is the latest value found.
• A separate IAB outlook (Radio Ink, 1 Oct 2025) forecast US podcast ad growth of 4.8% for 2025. The PwC measured growth was 17.6%. These are different series (forecast against reported revenue). Do not mix them.

Top five quotable figures

• US internet advertising revenue reached $294.6bn in 2025, up 13.9% (IAB and PwC, 2026).
• The UK digital ad market passed £40bn for the first time at £40.5bn in 2025 (IAB UK, 2026).
• European digital advertising reached €131.1bn in 2025, up 10.5% (IAB Europe, 2026).
• Spotify had 499 million ad-supported monthly users in Q3 2026 (Spotify, 2026).
• TikTok reaches 189 million people in the EU every month (TikTok DSA report, 2026).

AI in advertising

Most marketers now use AI, and the big platforms are automating more of the ad process. Consumers are less keen. Surveys in 2026 show a clear gap between advertiser optimism and public trust. This section covers adoption, platform automation, AI creative, consumer attitudes, AI agents and search behaviour, and agencies. Secondary sources are labelled and name the original they cite.

Adoption among marketers and advertisers

Platform automation: Meta, Google and TikTok

Generative creative at scale

Results and consumer trust

AI agents, AI search and commerce

Agencies

Notes and disagreements

• Adoption figures differ because definitions and samples differ. HubSpot: 86.4% use AI in some areas. Canva: 97% use it daily in creative work. Salesforce (secondary): 75% adopted. ISBA: 65% use it regularly and 41% had a live use case in 2025. Quote the definition with each number.
• Consumer sentiment differs by audience. IAB found 45% of US Gen Z and Millennials positive about AI ads. Gallup found 19% of all US adults positive. These are different populations.
• Meta's Advantage+ run-rate ($60bn in Q3 2025, above $75bn in Q2 2026) comes only from secondary reports of earnings calls. Meta's Q3 2026 release in the SEC filing contains no Advantage+ figure.
• The brief asked about Meta's plan for fully automated ads by the end of 2026. The article found says "by 2026" and describes a target reported by the Wall Street Journal. No end-of-year wording or confirmation that it has happened was found.
• The PPC Land article (Meta Q2 2026) has a title suggesting a later quarter. Its content covers the quarter ended 30 June 2026 and the call on 29 July 2026.
• HubSpot's page shows "Updated: 04/10/26". That could be 4 October or 10 April 2026. Survey dates are not stated.
• Gartner's $15tn figure is secondary only. The newsroom release on gartner.com could not be found or opened. Do not cite it as a Gartner page.
• Adobe's data is for July 2025 and holiday 2024. The holiday 2025 Adobe results were not opened.
• Pew's study used March 2025 browsing data from 900 US adults. It is the only click-through study of this kind found, and it is US only. Ofcom's UK data covers AI overview prevalence, not click-through.
• ChatGPT: the OpenAI statement is "more than 900 million" weekly users (27 Feb 2026). A forecast of 1 billion weekly users on a third-party site was not verified and is not used.
• EU AI Act: the law-firm summary says the marking duty in Article 50(2) may move to 2 Dec 2026. Formal adoption was pending when the article was written. Check the Official Journal before quoting a date.
• Meta and TikTok AI labels: a vendor blog says Meta applies an "AI info" label to photorealistic AI content in ads, and TikTok applies an AI-generated content label to realistic AI content, including paid ads. Neither claim was checked on Meta's or TikTok's own pages, and no introduction dates were found, so they are not in the tables.
• TikTok: the Smart+ and Symphony performance figures sought were not found. TikTok's October 2025 newsroom post gave measurement-tool results that are not about Smart+ or Symphony, so they are excluded.
• Yahoo and Publicis, Ipsos, YouGov (2026) and Attest consumer surveys were not opened. The YouGov data used is from January 2024.

Top five quotable figures

• ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users (OpenAI, Feb 2026).
• 97% of marketing leaders use AI in daily creative work, but 78% of consumers prefer ads made by people (Canva, 2026, via The Next Web).
• 49% of US adults view businesses' use of AI in ads negatively, against 19% positively (Gallup and Bentley University, Aug 2026).
• 82% of ad executives think young consumers feel positive about AI ads, but only 45% do (IAB, Jan 2026).
• Google users clicked a result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).

What ads cost to run

Running ads costs more than the media budget. This section gathers published prices for agencies, freelancers, in-house staff, creative production, tools and platform minimums. Several UK price figures come from one small UK research site (Whito), so they are labelled as vendor benchmarks. Each row names the page where the figure was read.

Agency retainers and management fees

Freelancer rates

In-house cost

Creative production

Tools and budget structure

Minimum budgets and platform fees

Notes and disagreements

• Whito's pages carry conflicting update dates. Its figures are indicative, mix rate-card ranges with published prices, and should be quoted as a vendor benchmark.
• Whito gives agency Google Ads percentage fees of 10% to 20% on its retainer page and 5% to 15% on its PPC page. The Social Shepherd says 10% to 15%. Quote a range and name the source.
• Whito's retainer range (£800 to £2,500 for social) is much higher than the median published social price (£358). Published prices skew to the budget end because larger agencies rarely publish fees.
• Whito's PPC page gives agency fees as £500 to £5,000+ in the body and £300 to £2,000 in its summary.
• Upwork's PPC page gives $20 to $45 an hour in its chart and $25 to $50 in its FAQ.
• Credo's survey figures are US dollars and the page was last updated in June 2022. Treat them as dated.
• Malt's page mixes pounds (overall and city rates) with euros (experience bands). Only the pound figures are used here.
• Gartner's own 2024, 2025 and 2026 releases do not state a martech share. The 23.8% (2024) and 19.4% (2026) figures come from trade press reporting Gartner. They use different samples and years.
• Gartner's share of CMOs who lack budget for their strategy was 64% in 2024, 59% in 2025 and 56% in 2026.
• Spotify's $100 minimum appears on two Spotify pages (US and general). The $250 applies only to Marquee booked through local representatives.
• A secondary TikTok guide (relevantaudience.com, 5 October 2026) repeats the $50 and $20 thresholds and says the help page was last updated July 2026. TikTok's own page is undated.
• Instagram's own help page for boosting posts did not mention Apple's fee, so the 30% figure rests on trade press.

Top five quotable figures

• TikTok Ads Manager needs a daily budget above $20 per ad group and above $50 per campaign (TikTok help page, read 2026).
• Spotify's Marquee and Showcase campaigns start at $100 (Spotify for Artists support, 2026).
• Paid media takes 31.4% of marketing expenses in 2026, up from 25.1% in 2021 (Gartner CMO Spend Survey via Chief Marketer, June 2026).
• UK agencies typically charge £800 to £2,500 a month for social media management (Whito, May 2026, vendor benchmark).
• Marketers use only 42% of their martech stack's capabilities (Gartner, October 2022).

Consumer attitudes and attention

People spend hours a day on social platforms, but they trust ads less than they trust friends, and they give any single ad only a second or two of active attention. This section gathers published figures on ad avoidance, trust, attention, platform use, tracking consent and purchase influence. Each row names the page where the figure was read. Older studies are labelled by year.

Ad avoidance

Trust in advertising

Attention

Platform usage

Personalisation and tracking

Purchase influence

Notes and disagreements

• The two ATT figures disagree. AppsFlyer reports 50% of users consenting. Adjust reports 35% among users shown the prompt. They measure different bases and neither gives a sample. Quote both and name the publisher.
• Blockthrough's 42.7% global figure has no method on the page, and its UK figure (18%) comes from a pageview analysis. The report is from April 2023. Treat it as dated.
• Ofcom's age table uses 18 to 24, not 16 to 24. No 16 to 24 TikTok or Instagram figure was found in the text read.
• The Ofcom Online Nation report was read from a copy hosted at ot.gr. The Ofcom web page for the December 2025 findings was also opened.
• Credos and Nielsen trust figures are not comparable. Credos asks about advertising trust in the UK. Nielsen asks about trust in formats globally, in 2015.
• Credos trust by channel comes from Marketing Week reporting, with no article date shown. The headline 40% was confirmed in Research Live (5 February 2026).
• Kantar's page gives 57% positive towards ads. A secondary summary says this was 47% in 2024. That was not confirmed on Kantar's page.
• The Lumen (2019) and Amplified Intelligence (2022) attention studies use different methods and markets. Do not compare them directly.
• On the 8-second claim: no credible source supports it. Cite the debunking, not the number.
• DataReportal's global page also describes social time of over 2.5 hours a day when video platforms are included. The wording was ambiguous, so it is not in the table.
• Sprout's sample sizes are inconsistent on its page (322 or 300 marketing leaders). The consumer sample of 4,044 is consistent.

Top five quotable figures

• 40% of the UK public trust advertising, a five-year high (Credos Trust Tracker, reported February 2026).
• UK adults spend 4 hours 30 minutes online a day, 10 minutes more than a year earlier (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
• TikTok reaches 56% of UK online adults every month and Instagram reaches 78% (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
• 81% of consumers say social media prompts spontaneous purchases several times a year or more (Sprout Social Index 2025).
• Only 25% of the UK public trust influencer ads, the lowest of any channel measured (Credos Trust Tracker, 2025 data).

Sources

Every page read for the eight sections, sorted by publisher. "Read, not cited" means the page was checked but no figure from it appears in the tables.

What is not on this page

Some figures that advertisers ask for could not be traced to a primary source with a stated method, so they are left out rather than estimated:

• Music: the share of independent artists who pay for ads, average promotion budgets, and cost per stream, pre-save or follower benchmarks from music marketing vendors.
• Music: label marketing spend as a share of revenue, and playlist or algorithmic discovery shares.
• Events: the share of tickets bought on mobile, purchase lead times, discovery by channel beyond Eventbrite's word-of-mouth figure, and cost per ticket on Meta or TikTok.
• Events: average club ticket prices, and measured UK ticketing fee averages.
• E-commerce: DTC budget share by platform from an industry body, UK or EU social commerce size, and customer acquisition cost after 2022.
• Formats: video against static CTR, CPM and conversion, hook and hold rates, and optimal ad length, where the only figures found came from vendor blogs with no stated sample.

If you publish a primary source for any of these, email the address on the contact page and it will be added with credit.