How many hours of music does the average person listen to per week, according to IFPI's survey of 26 countries?

How to get close to this number

Divide by seven and test it against a day. Around three hours a day, as the explanation puts it, is a commute, some work in the background and a bit in the evening. That is entirely ordinary once you remember that most listening is secondary to something else rather than a deliberate sitting-down activity.

It also matters whose average this is. The figure is not every person on Earth: it is more than 43,000 people aged 16 to 64, across 26 countries, estimating their own weekly listening for IFPI's survey. Children and people over 64 sit outside the sample, and the hours are what respondents report rather than a meter running on their phones.

Why guesses tend to come in low: asked to picture listening to music, people picture choosing an album or putting headphones on. Most listening happens alongside something else — at work, in the car, at the gym — and that unremarkable time is what adds up to three hours a day. The trend points the same way: 20.1 hours in 2022, 20.7 a year later, a habit still growing rather than levelling off.