According to Luminate’s 2025 Year-End Music Report, streaming catalogs have swelled to 253 million tracks, driven by an influx of 37.9 million new files last year alone. The data highlights a saturation point where independent and DIY distributors now account for 96.2% of this volume, often utilizing automated pipelines that contributed to Deezer receiving 50,000 AI-generated uploads daily. Enforcement mechanisms are reacting aggressively, evidenced by Spotify’s removal of 75 million “spammy” tracks to combat catalog bloat.
This hyper-saturation has forced a pivot toward “artist-centric” payout models designed to demonetize low-engagement noise, such as Spotify’s 1,000-stream royalty threshold. The market is bifurcating sharply; with just 0.2% of tracks generating nearly half of all global streams, the industry is effectively abandoning the “long tail” theory in favor of protecting the visibility of established professional content against AI dilution.
Curated by MusicResearch.com from theplayground.co.uk. Read the full article at: Streaming Platforms Now Host Over a Quarter of a Billion Tracks – PLAYY. Magazine
