When Music Stopped Mattering
How optimizing for attention instead of presence broke everything.
In the final weeks of 2025, Anna’s Archive (a digital preservation project) announced they had archived the vast majority of Spotify’s most popular tracks. Millions of songs that will be freely available soon.
The cultural response? Largely indifference. A few articles, some industry hand-wringing, but nothing close to the outrage piracy once sparked. The fan response? Largely indifference. These reactions tell you everything about where music is today.
We live in the golden age of music access. Every song ever recorded, any time, any place. Infinite playlists. Algorithmic recommendations. More new music uploaded daily than anyone could listen to in a lifetime.
And yet something feels fundamentally broken.
Artists who pour their souls into their craft can’t make a sustainable living. Fans have stopped actively seeking new music - they either retreat into familiar favorites or passively accept algorithmic recommendations that often reinforce existing preferences. Live shows increasingly price out the people who need community and catharsis the most.
Despite this abundance, or perhaps because of it, music feels like it matters less than ever.
The industry optimized relentlessly for convenience. It worked. We can listen to anything, anywhere, anytime. But in chasing that convenience, something essential was lost: the connection, the community, and the very idea that music is more than background noise.
The past had its own problems. It was worse in many ways. But charting a sustainable and abundant future for music requires being honest about what’s not working today.
The Economics Are Unsustainable
Start with the obvious problem: the majority of artists can’t make a living from their music.
Streaming was supposed to save the music industry. In some ways it did. Revenues recovered, though never quite to pre-streaming figures. Labels became profitable again. Tech platforms achieved billion-dollar valuations.
But for individual artists, the math is brutal.
The average per-stream payout is around $0.003 to $0.005. Earning minimum wage (roughly $15 an hour for a 40-hour work week, or about $2,400 per month) requires between 480,000 and 800,000 streams per month, every month. That’s 6 to 10 million streams annually to make a retail worker’s salary.
An artist who sold 500,000 records in 1990 - a gold record that meant radio play, cultural presence, and a sustainable career - would need over 300 million streams today just to match the income, with none of the cultural impact.
To put this in perspective at the individual level: when someone bought a CD in 1995, the artist earned roughly $2 from that single sale after label splits. Today, to earn that same $2, around 50 people need to stream the entire album front-to-back.
The math is worse for independent artists. In 1995, they could earn $10-15 from that single sale. Today, 300-500 people need to stream the entire album front-to-back.
So one passionate fan buying your record back then equals hundreds of casual streamers today. And that’s assuming people today listen to every track; most do not.
Here’s another example: a single radio play on a major station can pay out more than 1,000 Spotify streams. Yet the industry obsesses over streaming numbers. Radio has its own problems with corporate consolidation and label gatekeeping, but the metrics we’ve chosen to optimize for are completely divorced from artist economics.
The unit economics aren’t just worse, they’re fundamentally broken to an absurd degree.
Spotify paid out $10 billion in royalties in 2024. It sounds impressive until you examine where the money actually goes. The platform gets 30% off the top. Labels, distributors, publishers, and producers are paid the majority of the rest. By the time royalties reach the artist, they’re often 10-20% of what Spotify originally paid out.
And now, Spotify requires tracks get at least 1,000 streams in 12 months to generate any royalties at all. Spotify contends this is to address “spam”, but it effectively acts as another barrier for small artists, and redistributes payouts to artists Spotify deems “eligible”.
Streaming democratized access while concentrating wealth at the top. The solution for most artists became touring, except that touring became prohibitively expensive too.
Production costs exploded across the board: fuel, freight, venue rental, equipment, crew, security. With Live Nation and Ticketmaster controlling most of the infrastructure, most artists have little to no negotiation leverage.
Average ticket prices for the top 100 tours reached $123 in 2024, up from $93 in 2019. That’s a 33% increase, notably more than the inflation rate over the same period.
The cruel irony is that many artists depend on touring income because streaming pays so little, but touring now prices out many of the fans who want to support them. Live music is becoming a luxury good, accessible primarily to those who can afford premium prices.
The result is a disappearing middle class of artists. Musicians either play stadiums or work day jobs. The artists who used to earn $50-150k annually (enough to live modestly, focus on craft, build sustainable careers) are getting squeezed out.
And this entire structure rests on quicksand. One algorithm update or policy change can eliminate income streams overnight with no recourse.
Discovery Is Effectively Broken
The volume problem is staggering. Between 100,000 and 150,000 songs are uploaded to streaming platforms every day. That’s over 50 million songs per year. Even genuinely great music faces near-certain invisibility as the default state.
Algorithmic discovery was supposed to solve this, surfacing hidden gems through smart recommendations. But less than a quarter of streams come from algorithmic suggestions.
The vast majority (nearly 75%) comes from music people already know: existing libraries, saved playlists, deliberate searches. Listeners mostly return to what they already like, and algorithms tend to reinforce those patterns rather than expand them.
When algorithms do make recommendations, they favor commercially safe choices: mainstream genres, established artists, tracks that already have momentum. Independent artists face systematic disadvantages.
Even when artists connect with audiences, they don’t really know who those people are.
Platforms own the fan relationships. Artists see aggregate data like total streams and broad demographics. But they can’t communicate directly with listeners, understand what resonates, or build genuine relationships. The streaming services remain permanent middlemen who own everything that matters.
Connection Became Commodified
The real problem isn’t economic or logistical. It’s existential. Music is now background noise.
Streaming optimized for passive listening: study playlists, party jams, workout mixes, sleep sounds. It framed music as a utility, something to fill silence while your attention is occupied. There’s a place for that. But it’s not why music truly mattered to anyone in the first place.
What makes music matter is connection. The shared experience. Everyone in a crowd singing the same lyrics. Conversations with strangers about a mutual favorite album. Dancing until dawn. The ritual of putting on a record and actually listening, being fully present with the feeling.
Streaming delivered infinite access but made the experience solitary and passive. Music became another app on a device filled with other apps. Music became content, just like all of the other content. Listening happens alone, mediated by algorithms. The “lean-back experience” is convenient but ultimately empty.
Live shows still offer genuine connection: presence, energy, communal transcendence. But tickets are expensive and increasingly so. Plus, live music has inherent limitations like geographic constraints, venue capacity, and scheduling conflicts. Favorite artists might play a city once per year, if that. And that’s for those who can afford tickets. If tickets don’t sell out immediately, forcing fans to hunt in the astronomically-priced resale market.
The venues where authentic connection used to flourish are disappearing. Small clubs, DIY spaces, grassroots rooms holding 100-200 people are where fans and artists used to share the same space and form communities organically.
More broadly, we’ve also lost a musical monoculture.
There used to be albums everyone experienced together. Thriller. Nevermind. OK Computer. Collective moments where music was the beating heart of the zeitgeist.
Streaming and algorithmic personalization shattered that. Now we inhabit our own taste bubbles. Every algorithm a unique echo chamber. Shared reference points lost.
It makes connecting with strangers harder and makes feeling part of something larger nearly impossible. Music that used to create community now often reflects existing isolation.
Are we ok with this?
Music fans want more. They want recognition for engaging deeply with artists they love, not the same treatment as casual listeners. They want authentic connection to artists and other fans, not parasocial relationships mediated by social media. They want interactivity, personalization, and ways to participate meaningfully.
They want to be part of something that matters.
Current systems enable none of this. Streaming treats a superfan’s devoted listening the same as background noise. There’s no incentive to go deeper. There’s no map for forming more meaningful relationships.
Piracy Stopped Being Controversial
Let’s loop back to where we started: Anna’s Archive has copied most of Spotify’s catalog. Millions of songs, which are currently in the process of being made available for free.
In 2000, this would have sparked outrage. Record labels would have mobilized. Artists would have protested. Fans would have debated the ethics endlessly.
In 2026? Shrugs.
The reaction from fans wasn’t guilt or moral wrestling. It was indifference. Many pointed out that Spotify barely pays artists, so what’s the difference? If artists aren’t making meaningful money from streaming, why should fans feel bad about accessing music for free?
This reveals something profound: music has become infrastructure.
Like roads or water or electricity, music is now expected to just be there. It’s a utility that should work, funded by someone else, somewhere else in the system. It’s not something individual listeners feel they need to worry about sustaining.
And that’s not their fault. The system was designed to make them feel this way.
When infrastructure breaks, a bridge collapses or power goes out, people expect it to be fixed. But they don’t feel personally responsible for paying the engineers or utility workers. That’s someone else’s job. Some abstract entity’s problem.
Music has been culturally repositioned the same way. It’s not art you pay for anymore. People were taught to think this way with an unlimited access, minimal cost, all-you-can-eat buffet of music. After a decade of conditioning, fans got the message: music should just be available for a nominal monthly fee. Someone else will figure out the economics. The consumer’s conscience is clear.
Artists are supposed to make money “somehow”. Touring, merch, brand deals, Patreon, NFTs; whatever the current model is. But not from the music itself. The music is infrastructure now. The music should be free.
This is the logical endpoint of streaming’s value proposition. When you offer infinite access for $10 to $15 month (or free with ads), you’re implicitly saying music has no marginal value. Each individual song is worth approximately nothing. The only thing with value is the access system itself: the platform, the algorithm, the convenience.
The music industry recognizes the problem. The recent “Streaming 2.0” initiative proposes premium features to justify higher subscription prices: AI DJs, group listening sessions, lossless audio. The intent is right: find ways to increase revenue flowing through the system.
But these features operate within the existing framework. Higher subscription prices still go through the same distribution channels, subject to the same splits and economics. Without rethinking the underlying model around how value is created, captured, and distributed, incremental features will not solve structural problems.
AI Accelerates Everything
AI deserves its own detailed examination, which is coming in a future post. But it needs acknowledgment because it’s already intensifying the problems outlined here.
AI music generation tools are improving rapidly. Suno, Udio, and similar platforms can create decent-sounding tracks in seconds. The volume of music is exploding exponentially. Discovery is already difficult, and it’s becoming orders of magnitude more difficult.
For platforms, AI presents tempting economics: why pay royalties to human artists when algorithms can generate background music for free? The few remaining artist income streams could evaporate. If AI can create infinite music, how do we value human creativity?
The industry never solved for valuation in an age of digital abundance. AI is forcing that reckoning. In blind tests, 3 in 4 listeners can’t distinguish AI-generated from human-created music. If “good enough” becomes the standard, human musicians face profound uncertainty.
There’s a path where AI expands creativity and helps artists. But without fundamentally new approaches that prioritize human creative work, existing problems will be magnified.
So How Did We Get Here?
The industry optimized for attention instead of presence.
Attention is scarce, zero-sum, exhausting. Everyone competes for the limited hours, minutes, and seconds in the day. The attention economy is extractive by design: maximize time spent streaming, scrolling, watching. The goal is keeping people engaged but not necessarily fulfilled.
Presence operates differently.
It’s about quality over quantity. Being fully there: at a concert, lost in a song, lost in dance. Presence is energizing, creating energy rather than depleting it. It makes memories. It actually matters.
Streaming scaled attention remarkably well. More hours streamed, more songs as background soundtrack, more data harvested. But it never scaled presence. Live music creates presence but is constrained by geography, venue capacity, and ticket prices.
Infrastructure was built for platforms rather than people. Systems were designed around data collection, engagement metrics, and advertising revenue. Not systems that help artists build sustainable careers or give fans meaningful experiences.
In pursuing these optimization targets, the industry forgot what music is actually all about. Music isn’t just content to consume. It’s ritual and meaning-making. It’s how humans connect with themselves and each other: visceral, communal, sometimes transcendent.
What Fans Actually Want
What often gets missed in discussions about music’s problems is that the focus tends toward artists. Royalties, discoverability, sustainability. These and others are all legitimate concerns. But transformational shifts in music don’t happen because artist problems get fixed. They happen because fans get what they want.
Streaming won by serving listeners. It nailed convenience, portability, unlimited catalog access. It dominated the passive, lean-back experience. That was good enough for a while.
But what’s next? What do fans want now that they have infinite access and choice?
Fans want to lean in.
They want genuine personalization, not an algorithmic snake eating its own tail. They want recognition for their deep engagement, not identical treatment to casual listeners. They want interactivity, co-creation, and meaningful ways to participate. They want authentic storytelling, not forced social media personas.
They want connection; to artists and to other people who care as much as they do. They want to be part of something that matters.
There’s a Gap
Streaming provides passive access. Digital abundance. Live shows deliver active engagement, but remain expensive and geographically limited. Nothing truly bridges that gap. Nothing that’s simultaneously accessible, scalable, and deeply engaging.
Rob Abelow, who writes one of the most insightful newsletters on the music industry, articulated this well in a post: the highest-leverage opportunity is “creating the lean-in fan experience for discovery, connection, and community— that is not siloed to a single artist.”
That’s the next-generation unlock. Not another streaming service with marginally better features and royalty rates. Not another social platform for artist promotion. But experiences that give fans what they’re craving, while paving sustainable paths for artists.
The Path Forward
Twenty years ago, conventional wisdom said the music industry was on its death bed. File sharing had killed it. Artists would never earn money from recorded music again.
Then streaming emerged and brought revenues back. It created the problems we face now, but to its credit, something new was built from the wreckage of the physical media era.
We’re in a similar moment. Streaming rescued music from one crisis and created another. The future won’t emerge from incremental improvements to the current system; slightly better royalty splits, friendlier algorithms, cheaper tours. Those are temporary fixes.
The future emerges from asking different questions:
What if technology could enable impactful experiences of true presence at scale?
What if music was about meaning and memory rather than endless content consumption?
What if discovery happened through exploration instead of algorithmic curation?
What if artists could deepen and own their fan relationships?
What if the profound connection of live music was accessible to everyone, not only those who can afford premium ticket prices?
In the next post, I’ll examine XR and immersive technology, an industry facing parallel challenges to music. VR and AR promised transformation but struggled to deliver compelling reasons for people to put on a headset.
But what if the questions above (about presence, connection, and shared experience) point toward what both industries have been missing?
I’m Tyler Doshier. I’ve worked at Apple and TuneIn, and I’m a DJ and music producer. Now I’m building at the intersection of music and immersive tech. Liner Notes is where I explore the future of art, technology, and how we connect through shared experience.
Sources
Anna’s Archive:
Archive of Spotify Catalog: Reports of Anna’s Archive scraping ~99% of Spotify’s streaming metadata and audio (approx. 86 million tracks) in late 2025.
Streaming Economics:
Average Payout Per Stream: $0.003 - $0.005 (Spotify), widely cited 2024-2025 average.
1,000 Stream Threshold: Policy effective April 2024 requiring tracks to hit 1,000 streams/12 months to earn royalties.
Spotify Total Payout: $10 billion paid to music industry in 2024.
Live Music & Touring:
Concert Ticket Inflation: Average price for top 100 tours rose from ~$92 (2019) to ~$123-$132 (2024).
Market Saturation & Discovery:
Daily Upload Volume: 106,000 new tracks delivered to DSPs daily in 2025.
Algorithmic vs. Active Listening: Studies indicating that active listening (user-initiated) still drives the majority of streams, though algorithmic influence is growing (12% growth in 2024).
AI & Music:
AI Music Indistinguishability: 2025 Deezer/Ipsos survey found 97% of listeners could not distinguish fully AI-generated music from human-made music.