“As the world’s creator platform, we will provide the infrastructure and resources that will enable more than 50 million artists and creators to grow and manage their own businesses, to monetize their work, and effectively promote it.” This is Daniel Ek‘s long-term vision for Spotify. The entrepreneur and CEO said at his firm’s Investor Day last summer that he wants the “Spotify Machine” to eventually host the work of over 50 million “creators” (and over 1 billion active users) over the course of the next decade.
It’s a lofty ambition.
At the end of 2021, according to Ek, Spotify played host to recordings from just 11 million “creators” – a number that was up by 3 million year-on-year. That’s a long way off 50 million. There is, though, at least one music-driven platform launched in the past decade that has already surpassed the 50-million-creator mark Ek’s been dreaming of…. and beyond.
BandLab is a music creation platform that offers a suite of tools for creators to “make music, share their music with fans, earn a living, and even top the charts”. This week, the Singapore-headquartered firm confirmed to MBW that it now boasts over 60 million registered creators on its service, up from the 50 million milestones that it surpassed in June last year. That means BandLab has added around 10 million creators to its platform in little over six months – having already added 20 million in the 15 months between March 2021 and June 2022.
And that’s just a taster of the knock-out stats now emerging out of BandLab.
The company’s founder and CEO, Meng Ru Kuok, recently revealed in a Billboard interview that BandLab users are now responsible for creating approximately 16-17 million songs on the platform each month. That’s up on around 10 million tracks per month that were being made on BandLab in March 2021. We know life’s busy, the world’s non-stop, the music industry’s drowning in ‘millions’ and ‘billions’ these days, and you mightn’t even have read this far down in this article. But, sorry, we’re going to have to take a breather and walk you through those numbers again – because they’re jaw-dropping.
- Seventeen million new songs now being created on BandLab every month; That’s around 200 million new songs a year;
- Which is in itself around double the colossal number of total tracks currently available on streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music (i.e. 100 million). Here’s another way to slice these astonishing numbers: 17 million songs per month represents, on average, around 567,000 songs being created on BandLab per day.
And to think the major record companies keep getting agitated about a mere 100,000 songs being uploaded to streaming services every 24 hours.
