Is There an Oversupply of Music?

The Streaming Flood: Music by the Numbers

Remember when discovering new music meant flipping through record store bins or catching a band on the radio? Those days are long gone. Today, we're swimming—some might say drowning—in an ocean of music that grows larger by the minute.

The numbers tell a staggering story. According to Luminate's 2023 Year-End Music Report, over 100 million songs now exist on music streaming platforms. Spotify alone adds approximately 100,000 new tracks every day—that's about 40 million new songs per year. To put that in perspective, it would take you more than 570 years of non-stop listening to hear every song currently available on streaming services.

Economics 101: When Supply Outpaces Demand

Let's talk Econ 101 for a second. Remember that supply and demand curve from your high school textbook? When supply dramatically increases but demand stays relatively flat, prices tend to fall. That's exactly what's happening in music right now.

The value per stream has been steadily declining. In 2023, Spotify paid artists between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream—that's about 1/3 of what they paid a decade ago. You'd need about 250 streams just to buy a candy bar!

Think of it like this: imagine if suddenly there were 100 times more restaurants in your city, but the same number of diners. Each restaurant would get fewer customers, and they'd probably have to lower prices to compete. That's music in 2025—there's just too much of it chasing too few listening hours.

The Paradox of Plenty: More Music, Less Money

Here's where it gets really interesting. Despite this massive oversupply, the music industry as a whole is actually making more money than ever. IFPI's Global Music Report shows that the industry grew by 9% in 2023, reaching $28.6 billion in total revenue. So if there's more money flowing in, why are most artists struggling?

The answer lies in how that money is distributed. Music Business Worldwide reports that the top 1% of artists earn approximately 90% of all streaming revenue. The remaining 99% of creators are fighting over the leftover 10%. That's not just uneven—it's a full-on economic crisis for the creative middle class.

Economist Anita Elberse from Harvard Business School calls this the "winner-take-all" economy. In her research on digital markets, she's found that oversupply tends to create superstar effects—the biggest names capture an increasingly disproportionate share of the market, while everyone else gets squeezed.

AI Music: Turning the Flood into a Tsunami

And now, enter AI music generation. Tools like Suno, Udio, and AIVA can generate complete, surprisingly decent tracks in seconds. According to Goldman Sachs, AI could generate up to 600 million songs by 2028—six times the entire catalog of music created by humans throughout history.

From an economics perspective, this is like dropping a nuclear bomb on an already flooded market. When supply becomes effectively infinite, the economic value approaches zero. It's basic economics—when something becomes non-scarce, its price collapses.

Think about what happened to photography when smartphones put a camera in everyone's pocket. Professional photographers didn't disappear, but the value of a standard photo plummeted. The same transformation is happening to music, just at warp speed.

The Attention Economy: The Real Scarcity

If music itself is no longer scarce, what is? The answer: attention, in an age of abundance, human attention becomes the limiting factor. We still only have 24 hours in a day, and our ears can only listen to one song at a time.

This shift from a scarcity of content to a scarcity of attention explains why marketing budgets in music have exploded. Major labels now spend more on marketing than on advances or production. It's no longer enough to make great music—you need to cut through the noise of 100,000 other tracks released that same day.

Adaptation Strategies: Surviving the Flood

So what's a musician to do in this oversaturated market? Economic theory suggests a few strategies:

1. Differentiation – When a market is flooded with similar products, the unique stands out. Artists have found success by creating music so distinctive it couldn't possibly be confused with anything else.
2. Bundling – When the core product loses value, bundle it with something scarce. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour grossed over $1 billion not because her music is rare (it's on every streaming service), but because the live experience with her is.
3. Community Building – Create scarcity through belonging. Patreon reports that musicians who foster communities around their work earn 5-10x more than those who rely solely on streaming.
4. Specialization – Focus on underserved niches. Platforms like Bandcamp have thrived by catering to specific genres and collector cultures that major services overlook.

These strategies all share a common thread: they acknowledge that in an oversupplied market, you can't compete on volume or even necessarily quality alone. You need to create value that transcends the commodity nature of digital music.

The Future: Curation as King

If current trends continue, we're heading toward a future where the most valuable player in music might not be the creator at all, but the curator. McKinsey research suggests that as content abundance increases, consumers become increasingly willing to pay for high-quality filtering.

We're already seeing this with the rise of playlist curators who can make or break careers, and AI recommendation engines that determine what music actually reaches listeners. The power is shifting from those who make music to those who help people find it.

This isn't necessarily a dystopian future. Throughout history, art has adapted to technological and economic shifts. The Renaissance flourished under patronage systems. The radio era created new business models. The streaming era will evolve too.

What's clear is that we can't ignore the economic reality: there is objectively too much music being created relative to our capacity to consume it. This oversupply is fundamentally reshaping the economics of the industry, and anyone hoping to thrive in this environment needs to understand the new rules of the game.

The Silver Lining: More Music, More Possibilities

Despite the economic challenges, there's an undeniable upside to this abundance. Never before has so much diverse music been available to so many people. Genres that would have remained regional curiosities can now find global audiences. Experimental sounds that major labels would have rejected can find their niche.

And for listeners, it's a golden age. The challenge isn't finding good music—it's filtering through the overwhelming amount of it.

Perhaps the future isn't about less music, but better ways to connect the right music with the right listeners. In economics, that's called market efficiency—and in a market with 100 million products, we're still figuring out how to achieve it.