"Joe Aboud, a former major label executive and founder of 444 Sounds, says streaming platforms now see 100,000 to 120,000 new tracks uploaded every day - roughly 1.5 million a week. AI-generated tracks already make up nearly one in five uploads on some platforms, said Jeremy Morris, a media and cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, raising concerns about royalty dilution and algorithmic bias."
"CDs were an industry-designed format; MP3s came from outside the music business entirely, sparking a collapse in CD revenue that many mistook for the collapse of music itself. "People like to hear that the industry is failing," he notes, but the truth is more complicated: technology reshapes distribution, not demand. Streaming is simply the latest retail model - a place where Spotify's interface operates like shelf space in a record store, determining which artists are discovered and which disappear."
Streaming platforms now receive roughly 100,000–120,000 new tracks daily (about 1.5 million weekly), dramatically increasing catalog volume. A substantial share of uploads on some services are AI-generated, raising concerns about royalty dilution and algorithmic bias. Algorithms function as the new discoverability mechanism, effectively becoming digital shelf space that determines which artists gain prominence. Wrapped's gamified features—clubs, leaderboards, and listening age—reinforce platform centrality in shaping musical identity and fandom. Historical shifts from CDs to MP3s illustrate that technology alters distribution models rather than eliminating demand, creating new winners and losers within evolving retail formats.
Read at Axios
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