The landscape of streaming music is only getting bleaker by the day, from low payouts to the generally fickle algorithms that push a very select few artists. Unfortunately a report by Luminate does not alleviate any of that darkness for musicians.
Luminate's 2024 Year-End Music Report, roughly 99,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services daily – or about 2.77 million songs per month. This is down slightly from 2023 when roughly 103,000 songs were uploaded daily to all streaming services, but it's still an insane amount of tracks. The report also notes that there was roughly 202 million separate tracks available on streaming services at the end of 2024, which is up from the 184 million available at the end of 2023.
Here's where things get a little (a lot) terrible. Of those 202 million songs on streaming services, 93.2 million were played a maximum of 10 times. Given Spotify's policy of not paying out royalties for any track that gets below 1,000 streams per year, this automatically means that 93.2 million songs were providing free labor. The report also notes that 175.5 million did not meet that 1,000 play yearly threshold, so for all you math junkies out there, that means 86.88% of all music on Spotify isn't making a single cent. Great!
Oh, and one more grim Spotify statistic – roughly 95% of all artists on Spotify have less than 1,000 monthly listeners. Factor in all the AI-generated garbage that's floating around on streaming services and it's an even darker picture than the already-pretty dark picture above. For an incredibly in-depth dive into that, I strongly suggest anyone and everyone read Liz Pelly's recent article The Ghosts in the Machine right here.
