42% of 158M tracks on Spotify were played 10 or fewer times last year

Last year, 67.1 million songs received 10 or fewer plays. That’s his 42.1% of the approximately 158 million tracks available for top streamers.

Spotify’s 38 million songs won’t be played once in 2022.

These jaw-dropping stats come from a presentation at SXSW by Rob Jonas, CEO of entertainment data company Luminate.

why do you care?

Preserving all those seldom-heard tracks can be quite expensive. So setting a few thresholds could potentially save you millions of dollars on Spotify. Alternatively, Spotify could charge these underperforming artists something directly or through their distributors and find a way to keep the tracks on their system.

It’s an approach lauded by major labels, which have recently lashed out at the clutter of music services.

But where does it start and where does it end?

Is 11 plays a year good enough, or is 100 or 1000 good? And how are the fans reacting? Will it move to a streaming service that has kept its promise of ‘delivering all music for one month’s fee’?

See the full SXSW presentation here. From H/T to MBW.

Bruce Horton Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank, Senior Advisor to Bandsintown, President of Skyline Artists Agency, and Professor at Berklee College of Music.