On April 29, 2019, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek spoke to investors during the company’s quarterly earnings call. Ek frequently drops little bits of trivia during these calls and interviews with journalists about the scope and potential future of streaming music, but he dropped a big one this time around.
Spotify now adds about 40,000 new tracks each and every day, Ek told analysts. Previous estimates centered somewhere around big-enough numbers of 20,000 to 30,000. A year ago Spotify seemed to confirm the number of 25,000 being added per day, which is the figure we used in our Shitlabel Manifesto. (Which you should read, if only to see conjugations of the word “shit” repeated 83 times.)
To try to make sense of the completely non-sensical, that means with zero growth, Spotify will be adding 14.6 million tracks in the next year. But there is growth – there is always growth, always new music being made and with the permanence of digital music very little of it begin withdrawn. With now more than 50 million tracks available on Spotify, it’s entirely possible that Spotify may get to the point where it’s growing its library by 50% or more per year. And we may get there sooner than we think.
Interesting, Ek mentioned these numbers in the context of promoting the service’s “discovery” tools – algorithms and playlists and things to help users cut through the insane amount of shit that lies beneath the tranquil, well-manicured surface of the platform.
