You won’t believe how many songs are being uploaded to streaming music services EVERY DAY

When I saw this number, I thought it was a mistake. But then I checked the sources and found out that it’s apparently true.

According to industry monitor Luminate, an average of 120,000 new songs were uploaded to streaming music services each day in the first quarter of 2023. That’s 3.6 million a month or 10.8 million for the quarter. At this rate, another 43,200,000 will be added by December 31. That’s up from the 93,400 tracks per day that we saw for all of 2022.

Perhaps 4% is coming from the major labels. The rest is uploaded by indies and individual DIY artists. Oh, and there’s an ever-growing number of tracks penned by AI programs in there, too. In fact, they may account for the bulk of the new increase in uploads.

Here’s how things have played out over the last few years. (ISRC = International Standard Recording Code, an alphanumeric identifier assigned to a song. It’s how we try to keep track of things now.)

There’s just too much music. Estimates are that at least 20% songs on streaming servers have never been played once. Meanwhile, these tens of millions of songs are consuming electricity just by sitting there. Watch for that to become an issue.