The numbers for music in Canada for 2024 are in. What can we learn?

Now that we're safely into the new year, the recorded music industry is looking back at what exactly happened with music consumption in 2024. There are few surprises in the data.

Luminate is the watcher of all music consumption in Canada and the U.S. and has just issued its year-end report for Canada after sorting through its 500 verified sources and analyzing more than 20 trillion (yes, trillion) data points.

On average, 99,000 new songs are uploaded to streaming music platforms every day (down from an average of 103,500 in 2023), which works out to approximately one million per month. The current universe of available digital songs (and all streamers share the same catalogue) is 202 million, an increase of 18 million (about 10 per cent) from last year. Of that number just 8.2 per cent were provided by major labels, meaning that 92 per cent came from indie musicians.

Think about that for a second. More than 200 million songs available to anyone with an internet connection for free — or at least something close to it. In the old days of mega record stores, you’d be lucky to find 100,000 titles in stock. For anyone complaining that a streaming subscription costs too much and isn’t good value, give your head a shake.

Diving deeper, though, we start to see some glaring issues. Nearly half of those 202 million songs (93.2 million) received 10 plays or fewer. Approximately 175.5 million (87 per cent of the total songs in the library) were played 1,000 times or fewer. This is interesting because Spotify, the biggest streamer, refuses to pay out any royalties for any song that gets fewer than a thousand plays. Granted, a thousand plays isn’t worth much — the worldwide average suggests that this would result in US$2.38 — but those crumbs add up when spread over 175.5 million. How much is Spotify saving by ignoring the artists at the bottom?

How many songs got zero plays? We don’t know, but credible estimates put that number at 50 million, or a quarter of the total. (For fun, sign on to a site called Forgotify and you’ll get a stream of songs never before heard by anyone.)

Another thing to consider: How many of those 202 million songs are AI creations? Spotify is currently being slammed for offering “ghost artists,” cheaply made music that’s squeezing out proper musicians. If you’ve ever used Spotify for some background chill music, chances are you’ve unwittingly been exposed to this kind of music. How much does Spotify pay out to the people creating this material? It’s all work-for-hire piecework. Someone is contracted to create X songs in a certain style and is paid a fee. After that, Spotify doesn’t pay out anything for this ghost music — all in the name of saving money.

Back to the numbers. In 2024, streaming numbers shook out like this:

Canadians streamed 145.1 billion songs in 2024, up 9.5 per cent from a year earlier. We bought more vinyl, CDs and cassettes than in 2023 (4.8 per cent more) but when we combine physical and digital album sales, everything was down about one per cent, indicating that we’re not buying digital music, we’re just streaming it. We’re also more interested in streaming catalogue songs (i.e. tracks more than two years old) than something current, with a ratio of 74 per cent old to 26 per cent new.