There were 253 million music tracks sitting on audio streaming services at the close of 2025.
Yep: over quarter of a billion. Some milestone.
According to new data from Luminate’s new annual report, that was up by 37.9 million tracks YoY – an average of 106,000 uploads per day.
Most of this music was far from popular:
- Almost half of the 253 million files (120.5 million) hosted by audio platforms received fewer than ten streams last year.
- Almost three-quarters of it (73%) received fewer than 100 annual streams.
- And nearly nine-tenths of it (88%) received fewer than 1,000 annual streams.
We’re obviously a long, long way from Apple‘s promise to deliver “1,000 songs in your pocket” with the iPod.
As AI-generated music proliferates, are we now just a few short years from the likes of Spotify hosting “1 billion songs in your pocket”?
And wouldn’t such a tidal wave of content inevitably swamp digital services – while hurting artists, songwriters, and the perceived value of music amongst consumers?
Universal Music Group CEO and Chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge, certainly thinks so… and he’s keen to stop it happening.
Last week, Grainge delivered a stark warning about AI-generated content overwhelming streaming platforms in his 2026 New Year address.
“Validating business models that fail to respect artists’ work and creativity, and promote the exponential growth of AI slop on streaming platforms, is a grave disservice to artists, songwriters and all of us who work in music,” Grainge wrote.
This warning wasn’t theoretical.
Last year, Spotify removed over 75 million ‘spammy tracks’ from its platform, while rival Deezer reported receiving 50,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day by November – accounting for 34% of all daily uploads.
Yet despite this aggressive purging of content the total amount of music in the global audio-streaming ecosystem continued to soar in 2025.
Discussion around tracks that attract fewer than 1,000 streams per year is, of course, particularly relevant here.
Luminate‘s new numbers help illustrate why – with UMG’s encouragement – audio streaming services moved towards ‘artist-centric’-style payment models a couple of years ago… and why these models are now increasingly being stress-tested by AI.
In early 2024, Spotify introduced a threshold requiring tracks to attract at least 1,000 plays in a 12–month period to qualify for royalty payouts.
At the time, Spotify said 99.5% of streams on its platform went to tracks exceeding the 1,000 annual streams threshold. Under its new policy, it said, each of those tracks would earn more — with payouts previously going to sub-1,000-stream tracks redirected back into the royalty pool.
Deezer’s artist-centric model, launched in partnership with Universal and Warner, achieved a similar aim – providing a “double boost” in royalties to artists with a minimum of 1,000 streams per month and 500 unique listeners.
In his latest 2026 memo, Sir Lucian Grainge credited UMG’s ‘artist-centric’ initiatives with accurately predicting – and stemming – “the dramatic increase in the volume of irrelevant uploads, including the rise of AI ‘slop’.”
Yet the topic remains divisive.
Some argue that it’s time for Spotify’s 1,000-per-year minimum stream payout threshold to be raised even higher.
Others – including TuneCore owner Believe – contend such models represent an unfair system “centered around taking compensation from rising artists to allocate it to top and established artists.”
The new Luminate report, which you can download here, calculates that there was “an average of 106,000 new ISRCs [tracks] delivered to streaming services each day in 2025,” up +7% from the 99,000 delivered daily in 2024.
Where the growth is really coming from
One of the most striking revelations in Luminate’s new data is the dramatic shift in who’s uploading music.
Tracks distributed by major music companies – Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and their affiliated ‘indie’ distribution arms – accounted for just 3.8% of ISRC deliveries to DSPs in 2025.
That surprisingly small market share was less than half the size of the equivalent major market share figure in 2024 (8%), says Luminate.
Conversely, independent and DIY distribution represented a staggering 96.2% of daily uploads last year – a figure that some in the industry increasingly link to the explosion of AI-generated content and automated upload systems.
While 88% of tracks received 1,000 or fewer plays in 2025, Luminate’s data shows these tracks contribute almost nothing to actual streaming consumption (as illustrated by the chart below).
Just 541,000 tracks in the 1 million-50 million annual streaming bracket – representing barely 0.2% of all available music – accounted for half (49.4%) of total global audio streaming consumption last year.
Tracks played between 1 million and 10 million times alone generated 1.35 trillion streams.
Amid the deluge of low-engagement content, Luminate’s data does reveal some encouraging signs.
An additional 1.9 million tracks reached the 1,000+ streams threshold in 2025 compared to 2024.
At higher tiers, 6,800 additional tracks reached at least 10 million streams (65.6K total), and 1,000 more tracks hit 50 million+ streams (5.0K total).
However, the number of tracks reaching 1 billion streams actually declined slightly to 29 in 2025 from 33 in 2024 – suggesting that while the middle tier is growing, superstar-level success remains intensely concentrated.
Music Business Worldwide