What is the music industry going to do about unpopular music?
It’s a debate that’s poised to rage harder than ever in 2025 — thanks to new statistics revealed by market monitor and analysis platform Luminate today (January 15).
According to Luminate’s 2024 Year-End Music Report, 202 million separate tracks were available on audio streaming services at the end of last year. (That’s ‘tracks’ as in files with their own distinct ISRCs, or International Standard Recording Codes.)
That 202 million figure was up by approximately 18 million (+9.8%) YoY, when compared to the equivalent figure from Luminate’s prior year report (184 million).
In simpler terms: on average, comfortably more than a million new tracks were uploaded to music streaming services per month in 2024.
(Indeed, Luminate calculates that there was an average of 99,000 new ISRCs delivered to DSPs like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube etc. each day in 2024, down slightly on 2023 when 103,500 were uploaded daily.)
Important numbers… but there’s an even hotter talking point sticking out from Luminate’s new report, as shown by the pyramid chart above.
It’s this: Nearly half (93.2 million) of the 202 million tracks available on streaming services in 2024 were played no more than 10 times each last year.
Time for some music biz squabbles!
Many of you out there who may be, let’s say, more artist-centric-minded, would argue that these 93 million tracks should be excluded from the royalty pool on streaming services.
Of course, when it comes to services like Spotify, they already are shut out.
Last year, Spotify began omitting any tracks that hadn’t achieved at least 1,000 plays in a 12-month period from its royalty pool.
Luminate’s new numbers (above) show that last year, some 175.5 million tracks were played 1,000 times or less across multiple audio streaming services, including Spotify.
That’s approximately 87% of the 202 million tracks monitored by Luminate.
To flip that around for a second, around nine in every ten tracks on streaming services today fails to attract more than 1,000 plays per year across all audio platforms.
(Luminate didn’t reveal the number of tracks with zero plays in 2024, but it’s believed to be around a quarter of all available tracks – i.e. in the region of 50 million.)
There is, of course, a counter-argument to the “artist-centric” way of thinking.
Some in the music business are not fans of Spotify (and other services) blocking tracks that fail to hit popularity thresholds (for example, 1,000 streams per year) from their royalty payouts.
These folks often argue that when looked at as a whole, those 175.5 million tracks — the ones played 1,000 times or less each last year—claim a material market share of streaming’s total listens.
On the other hand, Luminate’s new stats highlight a problematic issue for much of the music industry: the oversaturation of streaming platforms.
The rise of cheap, free, and AI-powered production tools has resulted in an explosion of new user-uploaded releases, leading to an increasingly long tail of tracks on Spotify et al that are barely being noticed by listeners.
The same industry supply-and-demand problem was further highlighted within Chartmetric’s Year in Music report for 2024, issued this week.
Of the 11 million Spotify artists tracked on Chartmetric in 2024, just 5.31% of them (584,600) had more than 1,000 monthly listeners.
You read that correctly: around 95% of artists on Spotify have fewer than 1,000 monthly listeners.
And some 86% of artists on the platform, according to Chartmetric’s stats, have fewer than ten monthly listeners.
The numbers don’t get any less staggering each year, do they?Music Business Worldwide
