Music streaming keeps growing but a lot of artists are being left behind. Check out these numbers.

Two reports came out yesterday, both highlighting the growth of streaming subscriptions. At last count, over 713 million people now pay to stream music, up 14.4% over the last year.

MIDiA research published this graphic. Apple Music might be concerned.

The other report came from Chartmetric, a company that measures music consumption. Some highlights:

• 7,688,384 songs were released in 2023.
• Charmetirc ingested another 17,187,199 songs (new and old) into its system over the last 12 months. You’d need 117 years to listen to all that music. In fact, you’d need 42 years just to cover the songs released in 2023.
• Chartmetric doesn’t have the capacity to ingest all new songs. They brought in about 21,000 songs a day. That’s a fraction of the estimated (at last count) 120,000 songs that are uploaded every day. According to Luminate, 34,100,000 were uploaded to the streaming platforms last year.
• Only 0.05% of Chartmetrics “Undiscovered” artists broke out of that category into what they called “Mid-Level” or “Developing.” That means that 87.6% stayed “Undiscovered.”
• 77% of all artists are male.
• Less than 20% of artists reach 1,000 Spotify plays.
• Radio still has an impact. Half of the top 10 radio songs are also in the Spotify top 10.