With over 100,000 songs hitting streaming platforms every day, according to Luminate, is the music industry struggling to keep up? Milana Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Stem, sits down on Billboard On The Record to break down what this fast-growing number of daily uploads means for artists, discoverability and the future of music making itself. Lewis explores whether AI songs and white noise should be given the same royalty as human-made songs, how social media has rewritten the path to success and why artists today have more tools than ever to make music — but less clarity on how they can actually break through.
This episode of Billboard On The Record is presented by KOSIGN.
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00:00 Is There Too Much Music? The Streaming Overload Problem
01:47 Milana Lewis on How She Founded Stem
03:57 Post-Napster: How We Got 100,000 Songs Uploaded Daily
08:00 What Is Stem and Who Is It For?
11:32 AI-Generated Music: How Much Is Really Out There?
17:22 Artist Discovery Is Harder Than Ever
20:36 Streaming Fraud and the Bot Farm Problem
24:00 Is This the Best Time to Be an Artist? (Spoiler: No)
27:14 Fighting Volume With Volume — Where Does It End?
30:00 Streaming Fraud, iPhone Farms, and Bad Actors
34:22 Why Major Labels Are Getting Into Distribution
38:52 Streaming 2.0: Royalty Thresholds and Functional Music
42:33 How to Turn a Viral Moment Into a Lasting Career
46:00 Milana’s Tips for Picking the Right Distributor
50:52 Advice for Emerging Artists Breaking Through the Noise
51:45 Spin the Record: Milana’s Childhood Songs & Favorite Concert
57:00 Biggest Lesson Learned Running Stem
Host:
Kristin Robinson
Executive Producers:
Diona DaCosta
Jade Watson
Produced By:
Kayla Forman
Mateo Vergara
Edited By:
Rachel Derbyshire
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Is The Music Industry Officially Oversaturated With Songs? | Billboard On The Record
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Ah yes of course, prompting AI requires great effort and skill but producing Dance Music from scratch is the opposite. Sure.
❤
Her views on AI is invalid it’s not effort expended – It’s expression, context and artistry. They’re missing the creative voice in this conversation. Many aspects important here are abbreviated. This is corporate led mentality more than a genuinely open conversation about the arts and humanity
I’m no expert, but this is my opinion.
I think the crux of the matter lies in globalisation. It’s not just music,but also film, literature, the visual arts…
Anyone with internet access at home can make a song on their computer and go viral on TikTok.
Is the system saturated? Yes.
But most of the music is rubbish.
There are always talented people who transcend trends and have their own unique identity, but they are very few and far between.
To be honest it’s been that way since the 2010s. I mostly listen to music from The 1960s to The 2000s because music still felt fresh in those decades because I feel after 2007, music started to become weaker and over saturated. I’m not saying the 2010s are bad, but it’s a mid music era in my opinion. Most of the hits from that era has not aged well and hip-hop and pop are the only genres that were great in that era.
The 2020s is lowkey boring. Too much music and majority sounds unoriginal and takes sounds from other decades most of the music is just samples of music from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s.
Great conversation
Bruno mars
9 songs every 5 years
Thats what i listen