When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis

Most people's soundtrack of their lives, as the industry talks, it is created from the late teens to the mid to late twenties. That's what you listen to your whole life for the most part, and your discovery goes down pretty quickly after that...

It was that golden time on the internet where new music was thrillingly accessible, but not abundantly so. The treasures still had to be sifted out, by those who cared enough to put in the hours; snuffling through the music blogs and the BitTorrents in search of our precious truffles like the trendy little pigs we were.

I can still remember the ban... See more

There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.

To start I like to describe where music consumption is now. It's quite obvious to avid music consumers that you can create a better playlist yourself than could an algorithm. If you really wanted to sit down to create that perfect playlist for your day, you'd probably be able to do a pretty good job by yourself doing it. Spotify will do an okay job... See more

 2020 was the first year when streaming services overtook "family and friends" as the primary channel for music discovery, with over 62% of music listeners in the US naming DSPs among their top discovery sources.

As we grow accustomed to the convenience of shuffling a generated playlist, we forget that discovering music is an active exercise.