This piece of news came out around the end of last year and it was something I wanted to discuss. It’s a pretty insane statistic that takes the lead here – more music was released on a single day in 2024 than the entire year of 1989.

This staggering information came from this November 2024 article from Music Radar. The article’s focus is on subscription-based music software models, something that seems unpopular among creators. But the stat about music releases was one the press ran with to discuss in other terms outside of the debate about music software.

It is absolutely crazy to think that a single day last year had more releases than the entire year of 1989. Now, I don’t have the data in front of me to correlate any of this – the original info came from a Spotify executive. But I’m going to operate as though the information is true. It’s not like I have any reason to doubt someone who does have that info, and I’m not going to bother trying to count everything myself.

Of course, we are talking about two different worlds when lining up 1989 with 2024. One main point of the article is the accessibility of music creation now – it’s not all that hard or even necessarily that expensive to set yourself up to record music today. Gone are the days of aspiring musicians recording bedroom demos on tape recorders. The barrier to music creation isn’t really huge, a person could probably pick it up with the same cost as it might be to take up golf.

1989 was a whole different beast. If you wanted to make an album, you needed to be on a record label. It cost more than a house did back then to record an album in a studio with a producer who maybe knew what they were doing. Some independent acts were able to find studio time one way or another without label support, but the home recording market was barely there. The barrier to entry back then was a dragon that was extremely difficult to slay.

And now, of course, a person can release music easily through streaming platforms, where back in the ’80’s it required a physical release of some kind. The best a demo band was going to get was self-recorded cassette tapes. Now it’s an upload.

The difference between then and now leads to a lot of debate and questions. Was it better when acts had to have “something” to access recording technology, or is it better now that it’s accessible to most anyone who wants to give music a whirl? Some insist that we’re better off with more people able to realize their creative visions, while others contend that overall quality has dropped off a cliff and there actually should be some gatekeeping measures to keep “less talented” people out.

For me, I’m way more on the side of accessibility. I think it’s better that more people have the ability to record. Quality isn’t a concern to me because I can simply weed out what I don’t want to hear. It’s not like I’m pressing play on everything that’s released anyway – I won’t even run across 99.9% of this music being released. So it doesn’t really press me if a bunch of people are recording stuff I don’t really want to hear – I’m not exposed to it.

As a fan, it might be concerning to have so much out. It’s hard to keep up with stuff and adding more to the pile doesn’t really help. But again, it doesn’t really matter. Hell, I haven’t heard every album released in 1989, there are most likely records out there I’d enjoy that I just haven’t run across. I certainly can’t worry if exponentially more music is coming out today. It might be a pain in the ass to keep track of and I might miss quality music I would enjoy, but it’s not like I have to the time to keep up with everything anyway. I can’t really sweat it if there’s more music than what I can get to, even if some small percentage of it is stuff I’d truly enjoy.

Some will criticize the sheer amount of music coming out, and there are fair criticisms. Music creation has become kind of a slop content mill, just churn out something with a beat and get it up on Spotify to hopefully draw some streams and money. This is a real issue, though again I feel like the simplest answer is to just ignore it. I’m usually behind on music I actually want to listen to from known quality sources, so I’m not getting caught up in the “slop mill” or whatever we want to call it.

At the end of the day, I’m ok with the crazy volume of music coming out. I’ll risk having to dodge some bad stuff, which is generally easy to do, for the sake of accessibility. It is staggering to think that more music was released in a day last year than in the whole year of 1989. And I assume there were a fair amount of albums released in ’89. But I’ll keep to what I do and use the tried and true method to avoid any low-quality crap that might come out – just plug my fingers in my ears and say “I can’t hear you.”