Is breaking through as an artist harder than ever in 2026? Rob Jonas, CEO of Luminate, thinks so. “We’re now seeing close to 150,000 tracks a day being uploaded to streaming platforms, which is a material increase,” he reveals in an interview with Billboard.
Since about 2022, Luminate — as well as other industry stakeholders — have cited that “over 100,000” songs are uploaded daily and a lot has changed since then. The most obvious shift has been the popularization of generative AI tools, like Suno, Udio and more, which allow users to make finished songs in seconds. According to a 2025 Suno investor pitch deck, obtained by Billboard, the scale of creation on its platform is already massive, totaling around 7 million songs generated every day.
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Though not all of those AI tracks end up on streaming services, French streaming service Deezer has been actively cataloging the rise of fully AI-generated songs it receives on their platform and in a recent report, stated that it receives 90,000 fully AI-generated tracks daily or more than 50% of new music uploads on the site “at peak level in June 2026.” That suggests that the number of uploads had far exceeded the 100,000 stat.
Artists today also face additional challenges in breaking through beyond the sea of new music — they’re also fighting against older songs. Luminate has been tracking the rise of catalog music, or songs over 18 months old and has presented its findings in recent reports like Retro Revival and its 2026 midyear report. “We’ve been tracking the difference between catalog and frontline music, obviously, for a long time,” Jonas says. “What we’ve seen is a small, gradual increase in activity around catalog music… there’s a lot to unpack in terms of why catalog is becoming a larger and larger share of music.”
On the latest episode of Billboard’s music business podcast On the Record, Jonas joins to discuss the rising tide of songs online and the myriad of reasons why music listeners seem to be more interested in listening to older catalog music than ever.
To watch this episode of Billboard On the Record, check out the YouTube video below or click here for more viewing and listening options. An edited and condensed excerpt of the conversation can also be found below.
I imagine you interface with a lot of folks in the music industry who are concerned about what trends toward listening to catalog music mean for frontline music. What do you say to quell that anxiety?
Rob Jonas: It’s definitely a topic that comes up a lot. I think for a record company, it’s a great position to be in because catalog music continues to stream and perform. It’s a way for them to continue to build revenue and deepen engagement with fans, and developing frontline new artists is critical for the future. So it’s about having a healthy balance. I think the other thing, of course, we’ve seen is that the massive increase in financial activity in buying catalogs has also put a different level of growth into the music industry in recent years as well.
Is there an increasing level of difficulty for frontline artists to gain the attention of the public?
I think so. I think it’s harder than ever to break through. We’ve just been writing about that for a long period of time. Again, going back to numbers, we’re now seeing close to 150,000 tracks a day being uploaded to streaming platforms, which is a material increase. Breaking through and reaching an audience is really hard. Of course, as you’ve talked about on this podcast, a huge amount of that music is not even listened to. Twenty percent of all music seen on streaming platforms today has received almost no listenership in recent quarters, which is an astounding fact. Breaking through is really hard. But you’re right, active catalog buyers are making massive investments in buying these iconic catalogs. Some buyers are passive; they’ll sit on those assets for a period of time. But some are very active, and some of the resurgence we’ve seen around fans rediscovering this music is because of that active management of these incredible catalogs that have been bought in recent years.
How much of this perceived increase in catalog music listening is actually just that, in the streaming age, we have just a lot more data on listening habits than before?
I think there’s definitely that dynamic happening. Remember, Luminate now tracks close to 340 million recordings on our platform, which is a summary of really modern music recording. And if that music’s been around for three decades, we have an understanding of how that music performed over three decades. So we understand physical sales, digital sales, radio airplay and, of course, now streaming. And you’re right: The amount of data we have on streaming is continual. It’s every single day. We see everything in a minute level of detail in a way that probably wasn’t possible before.
You mentioned in a recent report all about nostalgia that often films and TV shows have the power to bring back older songs to popularity. Do you see that as a uniquely recent phenomenon?
Yeah, it’s interesting… The example we talk about all the time, which is a great one, is the TV show “Fallout” on Amazon Prime, which came from gaming. I’m not a gamer, but it was a crossover hit from gaming environments to Amazon Prime. For folks who know the show or the game, they’ll know that there’s a large amount of ’50s and ’60s music programmed into the game and now into the TV show as well. What we found is that a lot of this very obscure music from the ’50s and ’60s suddenly grew by 400%, 500% or 1,000% because people discovered this really obscure set of music sitting within this amazing TV show. That’s a really good example, but it happens on a very large scale as well. We’ve all talked about the “Stranger Things“ effect and other high-profile streaming content driving massive awareness of older music. The effect is very real.
Whenever I think about the rise of catalog music in the streaming environment, I also think about the decline of a monoculture. We seem to all be splitting up and going deeper into our own unique tastes. Are you seeing that top songs are getting less of a share of streams than they used to?
I think we are seeing a little bit of that happening. The diversification of what people listen to is real. We talked about nostalgia trends and retro revival, which has been a big topic this year and we’re seeing lots of things happening there. We talked about synch and its impact on fans rediscovering music that perhaps they hadn’t heard for a long time. At the same time, we’re also seeing a very clear trend around how different demographics engage with the music they heard as kids. If I think about what I listened to as a child that my parents were playing, that music still takes up a huge part of what I listen to today. Plus, this massive trend we’re seeing right now around late ’90s and early 2000s music is coming as a result of certain demographics reaching the age where they listen to music they heard as kids.
One of the things in your Retro Revival report that I wanted to point out is that you stated consumers ages 13-24 are “increasingly turning away from current music to engage with songs released before they were even born.” What do you make of that?
I think it’s exactly what we talked about. They are going back and listening to music they may have heard when they were very young. I think all this music being amplified on social media or included in TV shows is definitely driving that effect. And there’s also this interesting nostalgia trend around the world before Y2K. How often do you watch an older movie now and no one’s picking up their cellphone, and you look back and miss those times? I think that’s a part of it as well. It’s hard to unpack one specific trend. The ultimate benefit, of course, is that everybody can carry pretty much every piece of music ever made on their phone at all times and it’s very easy to go back and find this music as soon as you get any kind of tiny engagement with it.
In some ways, a rise in listenership for catalog could also equal less time to listen to new material, but I’ve toyed with the idea of whether the music industry pie is just growing, as is the amount of time that we’re listening to music. Maybe it’s not actually a zero-sum game between old music versus new music. What does the data say about that?
As a business, we’re very good at understanding what, where and how. We understand what’s being listened to. We understand where it’s being listened to in terms of what service it’s on. We understand how it’s being listened to. Is it from a premium subscription? Is it ad-supported? We have very little understanding of who, which is an important dimension. To answer that question, we do a lot of survey work to understand what’s happening and I think that does agree with the fact that music is being listened to more than ever and in more ways. So I think overall listenership is increasing, and I think that’s an incredibly important part of why we continue to see growth in streaming every year.
At the same time, growth in streaming and growth in music in the U.S. have slowed, which is why we talk a lot about international being the next growth area. Overall listening to music is growing everywhere, and I think international is growing even more than a lot of folks realize.
Luminate also has tracked the rise of vinyl and CD sales. I remember there was a viral stat from you guys a few years ago that about half of U.S. vinyl owners don’t actually have a record player at home. I think you have something similar for CDs, right? A lot of people don’t actually play their CDs.
In 2023, we found that 50% of millennials who bought vinyl did not own a record player. The good news is that increased to a third, so there are more record players out there, which is great. We now look at the same stat for CDs, and it’s pretty consistent. About half of the consumers who buy CDs do not own a CD player. They’re very much collectibles.
