In fall 2022, the music industry was fixated on the volume of new tracks being uploaded to streaming services — some executives believed it had crossed 100,000 tracks a day. But what if that number were to increase a thousandfold?, founder/CEO of Boomy, a company that offers aspiring musicians the chance to make songs in seconds with help from artificial-intelligence tools.
“The model right now, whether you’re an independent artist or on a major label, really sucks when rain and white noise is eating into market share,” agrees one executive at a distribution company. “That’s not music.” When companies upload hours-long playlists of rainfall with the goal of earning nighttime streams, “it’s hard to argue that there’s any composed thought in that — there doesn’t seem to be a creative act,” says, founder/CEO of LifeScore, which uses AI to “create unique, real-time soundtracks for every journey.” He adds, “Some aspects of that look like a cynical money grab.” Put more simply, functional music’s gain could be part of the majors’ loss.
It’s no surprise, then, that all of the majors have tried to establish a presence in this corner of the streaming market. In 2019, Donoghue wrote about a playlist called Sleep & Mindfulness Thunderstorms put together by Filtr, a playlisting company owned by Sony Music: a downpour cut into hundreds of minutelong snippets. UMG has partnered with the Calm app on 60-minute sleep remixes of tracks in its catalog.