All That Music

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) had an article back in January entitled “MUSIC STREAMING PLATFORMS NOW HOST QUARTER OF A BILLION TRACKS. WHERE DOES IT END?” Yeah, all caps. Part of what the article’s about is summarized here:

There were 253 million music tracks sitting on audio streaming services at the close of 2025.

Yep: over quarter of a billion. Some milestone.

According to new data from Luminate's new annual report, that was up by 37.9 million tracks Yoy - an average of 106,000 uploads per day.

Most of this music was far from popular:

• Almost half of the 253 million files (120.5 million) hosted by audio platforms received fewer than ten streams last year.
• Almost three-quarters of it (73%) received fewer than 100 annual streams.
• And nearly nine-tenths of it (88%) received fewer than 1,000 annual streams.

We're obviously a long, long way from Apple's promise to deliver "1,000 songs in your pocket" with the iPod.

As AI-generated music proliferates, are we now just a few short years from the likes of Spotify hosting "1 billion songs in your pocket"?

And wouldn't such a tidal wave of content inevitably swamp digital services - while hurting artists, songwriters, and the perceived value of music amongst consumers?

Platforms need to identify AI generated tracks, especially blacklisting record labels that upload loads of AI tracks. Although most of companies like Spotify who force botted playlists on their naïve audience probably wont want to do this as their audience is mostly a bunch of degenerates and bots. This has been proven in other articles.

I’m sure a large number of tracks out there are what I call shark tracks. They might have been copyrighted by the perp that uploaded them and they exist just to be able to enforce copyright strikes on ScrewTube and Shittify.

I at least know I’m in the fortunate few as most if not all of my tracks surpass 1000 plays per year over all 20 or so DSPs that DistroKid distributes to that seem to be viable platforms. Not saying much as in almost 6 years, I’ve only made about $5,000 US, but a few of my tracks surpasssed 100,000 streams and one reached 300,000 streams. Of course, tracking this has become much harder as DistroKid has stopped reporting streams and such in their aggregated reports, so I have to take the excruciating details and run SQL queries against the data.