158.6 million tracks fell short of the 1,000 mark while almost a quarter received no streams at all.
According to the 2023 year-end music report from Luminate – who measure music consumption via tracking sales, streams, downloads, audience impressions, and airplay – 158.6 million tracks fell short of the 1,000 mark, 86.4% of the 184 million tracks measured.
Collecting the data via ISRCs (International Standard Recording Codes), Luminate also found that 45.6 million songs earned no streams at all, which accounts for 24.8% of the 184 million tracks available.
Additionally, the report revealed that only 10 songs from 2023 notched up over a billion streams globally. In December last year, ‘Get Lucky’, the 2013 hit from Daft Punk, Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers, hit the one billion stream landmark on Spotify.
The Luminate report arrives following Spotify’s recent announcement of their new royalty policy, which will eliminate payments for tracks under 1,000 streams.
The streaming giant said the move forms part of their commitment to tackling what it describes as “payments lost in the system”, namely the “tens of millions of tracks that have been streamed between 1 and 1,000 times over the past year” and generate on average just $0.03 per month.
Meanwhile, BPI recently reported that streaming now makes up 87.7% of all music consumption in the UK. The data, published as part of their official end-of-year report, found that there were 179.6 billion streams in the UK last year, which has doubled since 2018.
