Global Music Therapy Survey 2025: Developments and Trends a Decade Later

The 2025 Global Music Therapy Survey offers a long-term examination on the profession's evolution, a decade after the inaugural 2016/2017 study. Designed to track developments in demographic characteristics, professional practice and processes as well as emerging trends, the survey gathered responses from 1,183 current practitioners (67.6% response rate) across 8 World Federation of Music Therapy regions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses provide insight into both consolidation and transformation within the field. The profession remains predominantly female, though gender plurality is rising, and educational attainment remains high. Since 2016, entrepreneurial role creation has more than doubled, reflecting professional adaptation to persistent gaps in regulation and systemic support. Practice patterns reveal a shift toward healthcare and private practice alongside sustained work in education and community programs. Music therapists serve clients across the lifespan, with developmental disabilities, mental health, and neurological conditions most frequently addressed. In-person delivery continues to dominate, yet telepractice and digital tools-largely absent a decade ago-have emerged as supplemental models, offering expanded access but also professional ambivalence regarding their integration. Respondents emphasized music therapy's contributions to resilience, social connection, prevention, and global health, yet identified enduring barriers of insufficient policy recognition, inequitable compensation, and fragile infrastructures that constrain sustainability. Overall, the survey portrays a profession that is increasingly confident, globally relevant, yet structurally vulnerable. Advancing its potential as a vital contributor to international health agendas, the field must now progress through coordinated policy advocacy, accessible education, equitable labor protections, ethical use of technology, and sustained research to strengthen legitimacy, and global impact.