Of the 253 million songs available on streaming platforms, 120 million received fewer than 10 plays during all of 2025. Half of the global recorded music catalog spent the year in near-total silence.
The figure comes from Luminate's annual report, the leading data firm in the music industry. Eighty-eight percent of all songs available on platforms received fewer than a thousand plays in the year. During 2025, an average of 106,000 new tracks were uploaded per day, 7% more than in 2024.
Production Has Decoupled from Consumption
For decades, the first major obstacle for any creator was making the work. Recording an album required a studio, an engineer, time, and money. Writing a book took months or years. That friction acted as a natural filter on the volume of what reached the market.
In music, 96.2% of new tracks arriving on platforms now come from independent or DIY distribution, not from labels. Deezer reported that 44% of its daily uploads are songs generated entirely by artificial intelligence: around 75,000 per day. It is the only service publishing that figure with its own methodology, though it may not be representative of the full ecosystem. At the start of 2025, that number was 10,000. In nine months, it multiplied by seven.
In books, Amazon capped Kindle Direct Publishing at three titles per author per day after the platform began receiving volumes that its own quality systems could not process.
Production Scaled. The Day Still Has 24 Hours.
In parallel, and for reasons that predate generative AI, the proportion of American adults who read for pleasure fell 40% between 2003 and 2023, from 28% to 16% of the population. 2023 marked the lowest level recorded in the entire historical series. The figure includes physical books, digital editions, and audiobooks, which means the decline is not explained by format but by available time and the willingness to use it.
In music streaming, consumption of recent music (tracks less than 18 months old) fell 1.6% in volume in the United States. Platforms continue to grow globally, but that growth is coming from emerging markets outside the industry's most developed country.
What Platforms Are Doing to Regulate This
Deezer detected and labeled more than 13.4 million AI-generated tracks during 2025, becoming the first platform to implement detection at the system level. Spotify removed 75 million tracks it classified as spam in September of the same year. Platforms are making massive moderation decisions that determine what content gets measured and what falls outside usage reports.
The "artist-centric" model adopted by Spotify and other platforms in 2024, originally pushed by major labels to concentrate payments on established catalog, sets a minimum of 1,000 plays to generate royalty payments. The expansion of synthetic content gave that decision an additional argument, though it had already been made for other reasons.
Attention as a Scarce Resource
Human attention is the only input that does not scale with technology. Uploading something no longer guarantees visibility. Publishing does not mean being read. A large catalog does not equal actual use.
In an ecosystem where half the global music catalog received fewer than ten plays over an entire year, the relevant question is no longer how many works exist. It is who has real access to the listener's attention, and which systems can register and administer that usage accurately when the volume to be managed grows faster than any manual process.
Rights administration systems need to operate at volumes that two years ago were unthinkable, distinguish genuine use from fraud, and maintain precision across a catalog where the gap between active and inactive works grows wider every month.
Sources: Luminate 2025 Year-End Music Report; Deezer Newsroom, April 2026; iScience / EpiArts Lab, August 2025; CISAC-PMP Strategy AI Study.