How much more can the streaming music business grow? Not much, it turns out

Just about every streaming music platform has experienced massive growth over the last 15 years. However, that unbridled expansion may soon come to an end.

Back in September at a music conference in Singapore, Sir Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group, stated that 100,000 new songs were being uploaded to streaming music platforms every day. That figure was confirmed at the same conference by Steve Cooper, the departing CEO of Warner Music Group.

The audience was shocked. Numbers like 25,000 or even 60,000 have been tossed around. But 100,000?

To be fair, neither man was talking about 100,000 unique and different songs. This number includes all the remixes, edits, alternate versions, live performances, special mixes (Dolby ATMOS/high-res/Spatial Audio, etc.), and the odd duplicate. But it’s still a lot. Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and YouTube Music all say they have at least 100 million tracks available. Spotify could be at that level, too, but the most recent official number I’ve seen for their library is 82 million.

To put that into perspective, even the biggest record store back in the olden days (i.e. pre-Internet) stocked 100,000 titles at most. If we assume that each album has an average of 12 tracks, that’s a mere 1.2 million songs.

We’ve long passed the point of Too Much Music. Our choices are endless, practically infinite. And this isn’t a good thing. Let me count the ways.

Let’s look at it from the perspective of the artist. Making your songs available for worldwide distribution has never been easier. But when you upload a track, it has to fight for attention with the other 99,999 tracks that were uploaded that day, not to mention the other 100 million already sitting in the library. Your brand new unknown track has to compete with practically every other song written in history.

No wonder it’s estimated that around 20 per cent of the songs in Spotify’s library haven’t been streamed even once. If we accept Spotify’s estimate of 82 million songs in its library, that means there are 16,400,000 tracks that remain unheard of by anyone, ever.

We’re starting to hear about fan fatigue, too. This once-wonderous all-you-can-eat buffet is beginning to make people queasy. All this choice has people flicking through song after song after song, looking for something perfect for the moment. This has become a grind as music is being used as a tool for our day-to-day activities rather than something that we can sink into and experience. We’re not listening; we’re merely soundtracking.