MBW’s Stat Of The Week is a series in which we highlight a data point that deserves the attention of the global music industry. Stat Of the Week is supported by Cinq Music Group, a technology-driven record label, distribution, and rights management company.
Amid a rise in generative AI tools and a growing digital music distribution landscape, more recorded audio is being made and released than at any point in human history.
This vast supply of content, some of which is literally just white noise, competes for a share of listening time with music released by artists signed, discovered, and developed by the record business establishment.
The situation has drawn the ire of record business leaders like Universal Music Group Chairman and CEO, Sir Lucian Grainge, who calls it “oversupply”.
Now a new set of stats have arrived that illustrate just how fast this deluge of new content is actually growing on DSPs.
According to Luminate (the entertainment market monitor and insights provider that was once known as MRC Data and Nielsen Music), an average of 120,000 ISRCs (i.e. new music audio files) were added to music streaming services – across audio and video platforms – per day in Q1 2023.
That works out to a total of 10.08 million new tracks uploaded to the likes of Spotify, YouTube Music and other music streaming services in the first three months of the year alone, according to Luminate.
If the number of average daily new track uploads continues at the same rate of 120,000 per day for the rest of the year, by the end of 2023, over 43 million new tracks will have been uploaded to Spotify and other music streaming services this year.
That 120,000 track-per-day average is up from the 93,400 average tracks uploaded per day in all of 2022, according to Luminate.
Luminate estimates that there were 34.1 million tracks uploaded to music streaming services in 2022, which was up 12% YoY from 30.5 million tracks across the whole of 2021.
These figures were included in Luminate’s new Q1 2023 report, the highlights from which were presented by Luminate CEO Rob Jonas at Music Biz in Nashville last week.
Elsewhere in the report, Luminate reports that the volume of global on-demand audio streams grew 23% YoY in Q1 2023 versus Q1 2022, and that US on-demand audio streams were up 14.2% in Q1 2023 versus Q1 2022.
The fastest-growing genres in 2023 so far in the US are Latin, Country and World Music, says Luminate.
On Universal Music Group’s Q1 earnings call, Sir Lucian Grainge criticized what he calls the “content oversupply” that currently sees around 100,000+ tracks distributed to music streaming services each day.
“Not many people realize that AI has already been a major contributor to this content oversupply,” said Grainge.
“Most of this AI content on DSPs comes from the prior generation of AI, a technology that is not trained on copyrighted IP and that produces very poor quality output with virtually no consumer appeal.”
The broader conversation about the supply of content to DSPs, and the value of that content on DSPs, was recently raised by Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl on WMG’s latest quarterly earnings call.
Kyncl reiterated that artists – especially those who attract subscribers to streaming services in the first place – should be paid more than other types of music.
“Every stream [in music today] is valued exactly the same way,” said Kyncl, referring to the dominant ‘pro rata’ royalty model on modern streaming services. “That doesn’t seem like something that’s aligned with the way the world works.”
He added: “It can’t be that an Ed Sheeran stream is worth exactly the same as a stream of rain falling on the roof.”
