Making music in 2024 is arguably more accessible than it's ever been. If you've got any recording device, an instrument, and some way to upload it to any streaming service (or Bandcamp, etc.), then you've got the means to put your music out there. It's also no secret that people are doing exactly that – there were roughly 120,000 songs uploaded to streaming services every day in June 2023, with that number having grown quite a bit since then.
So just how much music is that? In a report from Music Radar, Will Page, former Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS For Music put it into perspective: "More music is being released today [in a single day] than was released in the calendar year of 1989." He continued: "And more of that music is being done by artists themselves, meaning there's even more demand for music production software."
Even more insane, the report notes that there was a 12-percent increase in music creators between 2021 and 2022 to a whopping total of 75.9 million music creators. That number is expected to reach 198.2 million music creators by the end of the 2020s, prompting the logical question of "what the hell do we do about that?" Considering how little visibility artists get now, and how it seems to only be getting worse with the above number and how algorithms tend to push a select few artists, the report certainly feels grim as the ocean of creators only gets wider and deeper.
And thus, we must turn to one of the main offenders for artists making zero money – Spotify. In November 2023, Spotify announced that they wouldn't be paying royalties for any song that didn't get at least 1,000 streams yearly, effectively getting free labor from some artists. Then in December the company laid off 17% of its staff, and last week CEO Daniel Ek made some incredibly terrible comments about "the cost of creating content being close to zero." But don't worry! They made Spotify more expensive and the company is doing very, very well.
