If you read the report that was released by Luminate and reported by Music Business World Wide the spring of 2023. The numbers from Luminate, a company that monitors several streaming sites were that of the 158 million songs they were monitoring 24% had no streams whatsoever during the year 2022. 24% is close to 38 million songs that were never been heard during 2022.
Imagine a scenario where each resident of Canada pens a song, yet not a single note finds its way to human ears. While this statistic is indeed eye-opening, let’s not overlook the sheer magnitude of songs Luminate scrutinizes – a colossal 158 million. This prompts the question: How many songs are good enough to listen to?
This is a problem today with all art. We have all channels to reach out to people. There will be great art that will be discovered. At the same time, how much great art is just buried in the brown wave of art that really has no meaning at all?
Perusing the numbers further paints a vivid picture. Out of those 158 million songs, a mere 15 managed to breach the one-billion-listens threshold, underscoring the concept of last year’s global hits. Moreover, around 3,000 songs garnered between 100 million and one billion streams, while approximately 43,000 secured between 10 million and 100 million streams, often indicating a solid hit within a specific nation. Moving down the scale, 327,000 songs acquired between one million and 10 million streams, typically reflective of niche popularity. An additional 1.6 million songs nestled within the range of 100,000 to one million streams – figures commonly attributed to respected local bands.
However, herein lies the alarming reality. These songs, with their impressive stream counts, represent a mere 0.01% of the colossal musical spectrum. And the situation deteriorates: a staggering 42% of the 158 million songs endured fewer than 10 streams, while 24% languished in complete silence.
Sure there is plenty of songs out there from old albums, albums from artists that existed twenty years ago and never did any success. But no streams? I know from my own label we have a lot of groups that only existed for a short period and just did one release and then disappeared. I checked and actually in our whole catalog, 97% had over ten streams last year. I guess that is because all of our releases were promoted, and there are still people listening to the songs as part of their old playlists.
What would be interesting is to see how many of the songs that were released 2022 and got no play. And how much of that was just AI songs that was released to make the computer learn what works or not?
What we see today is that the artist uses the demos as releases to get feedback to make the next song better. The song has a value time like a post in social media. A pretty new system and totally the opposite of the old one, where you had to compete to even get the chance to record the song, and after that work even harder to be part of the artist that was on the record store shelf. The interesting part is that both systems still make the same number of artists that are on the top self even if it’s digitally today.
Should you just go for recording demos and take a chance that one just sticks? Or should you go on developing songs to make them better and then release them at a slower pace? That is the big question, we still know that to make an iconic song you need quality. To just get a fast hit you need the speed to make it spread. It’s all about marketing and the digital world hasn’t made it easier to market, just easier to market to the people that already know. I guess we have to get back to some old-school marketing tricks to just break and artists. I won’t disclose anything yet, but I’m just on a totally new journey in the music industry.
