Streaming music services have access to 176 million songs yet some tracks are still missing and lost. Why?
According to the latest estimates I’ve seen, 120,000 songs are uploaded to the streaming music platforms every day. Based on a series of extrapolations (inexact as they might be), this points to a digital library of somewhere north of 176 million songs.
Think about that: We can hear any of 176 million songs whenever we want, wherever we are, on whatever device we’re using. And the cost? Free, or something close to it. That’s insanely cool.
However, there are still plenty of songs that haven’t been added to the celestial jukebox. Why? Where are these missing and lost songs? There are several reasons for their current AWOL-ness.
- Licensing issues. Ownership of the song is confused and no one seems to have the will to sort things out so the track(s) can be legally uploaded. This happens when catalogues get sold and transferred and when labels go out of business with no legacy plan.
- An artist has no champion. If an artist gets dropped by a label, it means the company no longer believes that artist’s music is viable in any way. It just languishes in a hard drive or vault somewhere and is eventually forgotten.
- Personal issues.Some artists are just dead against streaming. Tool refused to play the streaming game for years. So did Garth Brooks.
- Some songs are just…lost. If you’re dealing with nearly 200 million songs, a few are going to go missing for whatever reason.
According to this BBC article (via Rick J), it’s estimated that only 20% of the available recorded songs–and we’re going back to the 1880s here–are available to stream. If we use the number 176 million as our baseline, that means the total number of recordings made my humankind is around 880,000,000. That means we’re still missing over 700,000,000 songs.
And it’s not necessarily obscure, ancient, or foreign language tracks. Songs by The Payolas, Charlie XCX, Ray Charles, and, er, Mr, Blobby are nowhere to be found.
Where are they? Good question.
Finding those songs and convincing their owners to make them available for streaming is the job of Rob Johnson. He works in business development for a law firm in London. Over the last several years, he’s managed to get releases by Sting, Cher, Annie Lennox, and more onto the streaming platforms, At last count, he’s rescused 725 releases.
Read his story here.
