150,000 songs were uploaded today

And another 150,000 will be uploaded tomorrow. 

And the day after that.  

Yep… according to research group Luminate, streaming platforms are now receiving close to 150,000 new tracks every… single… day:

Context: that number used to be around 100,000 

And here’s the stupid part, lol… 

Of the 253 million tracks Luminate tracked last year, 55.3 million received zero streams. 

Not a few streams… ZEEEEROOOO. 

Another 65.2 million received between 1 and 10. 

Sooo if you’re an artist… I think we need to get to grips with something: 

Music, recorded audio, is not scarce anymore. 

And it’s about to become even less scarce! AI is obviously accelerating this. Deezer says fully AI-generated music now accounts for more than half of its daily uploads. Apple Music has said it’s more than a third of theirs. 

But ya know? I don’t even think AI is the most interesting part of this story. 

Because we’ve spent the last 20 years removing every barrier between having an idea and releasing it. 

You’ve heard me harp on this before: 

Recording got cheaper. Distribution became basically free. Promotion became democratized. And now AI is removing even more friction from the act of creation itself. Which means we’re rapidly approaching a world where there is effectively an infinite amount of music. 

So what’s scarce? 

YOU are. 

Your story is scarce. Your taste is scarce. Your perspective is scarce. Your community is scarce. The experience of watching you do something extraordinary in a room full of other human beings is scarce. The weird little world you’ve built around your music is scarce. The handwritten note inside the record someone ordered from you is scarce. (I do this, and more, for all RIŽIK orders from my shop.) The 70 people who showed up to some strange little event you threw because you believed a scene should exist are scarce. 

In other words… human context is scarce.

And I think that’s gonna completely change what it means to build an artist career. 

For years, artists have been taught that the job is basically: 

Make music.. release music... promote music... repeat. 

And increasingly, I think that’s insufficient. 

Because you’re competing in a universe where another 150,000 pieces of music just entered the market while you were deciding which mastering engineer to use!! 

So here comes the zag: 

The answer isn’t necessarily to make more. 

I think it’s the opposite. 

Make things… that MEAN more. 

Create worlds around them. Give people reasons to care about where the music came from. 

Perform it. Explain it. Gather people around it. Make physical shit. Build rituals. Build community. 

Create moments that can’t simply be generated again tomorrow. 

There’s an irony here that I find really beautiful: 

The more abundant music becomes, the more valuable HUMANITY becomes. 

And maybe that’s actually good news for artists! Because the thing machines are making cheaper isn’t necessarily the thing that made great artists matter in the first place. 

A song can be generated. 

A reason to care about it… cannot be.

Here's the full article about Luminate's study if you wanna dig deeper.