It’s one of the most oft-cited stats in the modern music business: little over a year ago, Spotify confirmed that it was adding circa 20,000 tracks a day to its service.
Today, an eyebrow-raising update: Spotify founder Daniel Ek told investors this morning (April 29), that “close to 40,000” tracks are now being uploaded to the Spotify platform daily.
That, as if you needed telling, is an astonishing amount of music.
Here come an easy set of extrapolations. Forty thousand tracks per day is the equivalent of 280,000 songs a week, or around 1.2 million tracks per calendar month. In a year, this volume would add up to a whopping 14.6 million.
Therefore, at its current rate, every three-and-a-half years, Spotify will add over 50m tracks to its library.
Yikes.
“With more than 50 million tracks now available on Spotify, and growing by close to 40,000 daily, the discover tools we’re building have never been more important to consumers and artists alike.”
Daniel Ek (pictured), speaking to investors today (April 29)
Now, let’s assume that the average length of these tracks is three minutes; a fair, finger-in-the-air guess at the mean length of a modern day pop song.
Forty thousand three minute tracks would be the equivalent of 2,000 hours of music. Two thousand hours.
In other words, every day – ie. 24 hour period – Spotify is ingesting such a vast mass of music, it would take you just over 83 days, with no sleeping allowed, to listen to it all.
Wow.
Daniel Ek also confirmed today that the “number of creators that are engaging directly with Spotify’s platform continues to increase, growing to over 3.9 million” in the first three months of 2019.
That’s an investor-y way of saying that 3.9 million artists (and podcasters) now feature within Spotify’s gigantic catalog.
Commented Ek, with words to bring slim comfort to independent artists now panicking that they’ll never be found on the world’s biggest music streaming platform: “In Q1, we saw a 20% increase in the number of artists streamed on our platform year-over-year and a 29% increase in the number of artists with at least 100,000 listeners.
“We believe this engagement from artists, labels and publishers shows a strong sign that there’s an increased appetite for more marketplace tools and services.”
He added: “With more than 50 million tracks now available on Spotify and growing by close to 40,000 daily, the discover tools we’re building have never been more important to consumers and artists alike.”
Spotify announced earlier today that it hit 100m paying subscribers globally at the end of March, with 217m Monthly Active Users overall.Music Business Worldwide
