It's only getting more difficult to rise to the top on Spotify. According to Universal Music Group CEO and Chairman Sir Lucian Grainge at the recent Music Matters conference (by way of Music Business Worldwide), more than 100,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every single day. For reference, Spotify passed the 60,000 mark in February 2021, 40,000 mark in April 2019, and 20,000 mark sometime in early 2018. So things are accelerating at a pretty rapid pace.
Spotify has also been expanding their business in recent months to include selling concert tickets to fans, as well as doing something with the Wordle spinoff Heardle. Of course the main question that always seems to crop up is when artists will get paid more for their work that keeps flowing into the service (at a faster and faster pace). Big names like Ozzy Osbourne have been critical of the service's payout, who said in a recent interview "Spotify is a fucking joke," while All That Remains vocalist Phil Labonte recently said it's insane to "glibly act as if $0.0007 cents for every spin is fair." Other artists have taken to uploading 1,000 30-second songs as a protest.
MBW further reports comments made by CEO of Warner Music Group Steve Cooper at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia event, who said of the 100,000 song mark: "The complexity of being able to separate one’s music from the other 99,999 tracks uploaded that day is incredibly complex [and] incredibly difficult." He later added "Most creators don't have the capital, the skill levels, [or] the expertise to [perform proper promotion] and be successful [as more music gets uploaded online]." Cooper suggested potentially looking at Web3 solutions as alternative outlets, which of course includes the ever-controversial topics of things like blockchain technologies and tokens.
So yeah, there's just way too much music being uploaded every day to Spotify.
