Music Industry: Is the Market Oversaturated With New Songs?

With more than 100,000 songs hitting streaming platforms every day, according to Luminate, is the music industry struggling to keep up? Milana Lewis, cofounder and CEO of Stem, sits down with Billboard On The Record to break down what this fast-growing number of daily uploads means for artists, discoverability and the future of music-making itself. Lewis explores whether AI songs and white noise should be given the same royalty as human-made songs, how social media has rewritten the path to success and why artists today have more tools than ever to make music — but less clarity on how they can actually break through.

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Kristin Robinson: Over 100,000 songs that are being uploaded to streaming services daily, and I wanted to ask you how we got here.

Milana Lewis: So let’s talk about what happened in the digital space post-Napster, and also how that had an impact on the music business.

Of these over 100,000 songs that are being uploaded to streaming services every day, an increasing percentage of those are AI songs. And then Deezer says that 44% of what they receive every single day.

There is a cost to serve, of maintaining music on servers.

Do you think that this is the best time to be an artist?

No, ’cause you can’t just be an artist. You have to be a media creator.

We’re fighting volume with all these clips, all this more volume on social media.

It might be less to produce content and to make music today, but it’s a lot more expensive to cut through and to market.

Is there too much music? OK, now that I’ve hooked you with a bit of a controversial question, let me explain what I mean. So, there’s over 100,000 songs that are being uploaded to streaming services every day, according to Luminate, at this point. And in 2023, over 45 million songs didn’t have a single stream that year. Plus, French streaming service Deezer just reported that it’s found 44% of daily song uploads are now 100% AI-generated songs. And that’s not even counting all of the AI-assisted work that’s likely also coming onto the platform at the same time. Several of the smaller streaming services, including Deezer, have expressed that there’s an unsustainable cost that’s mounting when they try to store all of these songs. And then, ask any artists that you know, and with all this noise, it is incredibly hard to get your songs noticed today.

Keep watching for more!

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/video/is-music-industry-oversaturated-with-songs-on-the-record/)._