What Is The Music Industry Going To Do?
This debate will be hotter than ever in 2025, thanks to new statistics released by a market monitoring and analysis platform. Luminate today (January 15).
According to Luminate in 2024 End of year music report, 202 million select tracks were made available on audio streaming services late last year. (These are “tracks”, as in files with their own ISRC or International Standard Recording Codes.)
What 202 million the figure has increased approximately 18 million (+9.8%) Year on year compared to the same figure from the previous year’s Luminate report (184 million).
Simply put: averagely comfortable over a million new tracks were uploaded to music streaming services per month in 2024.
(Indeed, Luminate calculates that the average 99,000 new ISRCs were delivered to DSPs such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc. each day in 2024, slightly lower than in 2023, when 103,500 were loaded daily.)
Important Numbers In A Changing Landscape
Important numbers… but there’s an even hotter topic of conversation. The new Luminate report has illustrated a concerning trend.
This: Almost half (93.2 million) of the 202 million tracks available on streaming services were played 10 times or fewer last year.
Time for a fight in the music business!
Many of you, let’s say, who are more artist-oriented would argue that these 93 million tracks should be excluded from the royalty pool on streaming services.
Of course, when it comes to services such as Spotify, they already are doing so.
Last year, Spotify began eliminating any tracks that didn’t achieve at least 1000 plays over a 12-month period from its royalty pool.
Luminate the new figures show that last year roughly 175.5 million tracks were played 1000 times or less across various audio streaming services, including Spotify.
This comprises around 87% of the 202 million tracks monitored by Luminate.
To put it another way, nearly nine out of every ten tracks available on streaming services today don’t exceed 1000 plays per year across all audio platforms.
(Luminate did not disclose the number of tracks that went unplayed in 2024, but estimates suggest it could be around a quarter of all available tracks—approximately 50 million.)
The Ongoing Debate In The Music Industry
Of course, there is a counter-argument rooted in the “art-oriented” perspective.
Some individuals in the music business oppose Spotify (and other platforms) for excluding royalty payments to tracks that haven’t reached the required popularity threshold (for instance, 1000 plays per year).
These critics often argue that when considering generally the 175.5 million tracks—those that were played 1,000 times or fewer in the past year—account for a significant market share of total streaming listens.
On the other hand, Luminate’s new statistics underscore a troubling issue for much of the music industry: a glut of content on streaming platforms.
The prevalence of cheap, AI-powered production tools has triggered an explosion of new releases uploaded by users, resulting in more tracks on Spotify, etc., which are largely unnoticed by listeners.
The same problem of supply and demand in the industry has emerged. As highlighted in the Chartmetrics A Year in Music 2024 report released this week.
Of the 11 million Spotify artists tracked by Chartmetric in 2024, only 5.31% (584,600) had more than 1000 monthly listeners.
You read that correctly: approximately 95% of artists on Spotify have less than 1,000 monthly listeners.
Moreover, about 86% of artists on the platform, according to Chartmetric statistics, have less than ten monthly listeners.
The numbers don’t bode well as they continue to appear overwhelming each year, don’t they?
