Streaming Is Booming, but Local Music Scenes Pay the Price | Opinion

Streaming has transformed the way music is consumed, allowing songs to reach listeners around the world in mere hours. The music industry is booming, with global recorded music revenue reaching a record $31.7 billion in 2025, with streaming accounting for over two-thirds of that total. However, this growth raises an important question: is the music culture becoming homogenized and losing its unique character?

The greatest threat to music is not artificial intelligence, but rather an industry that prioritizes scale over culture. Metrics like streams, followers, and engagement rates have become primary measures of success, but they cannot capture whether a song has sparked a movement, strengthened a community, or altered the way a generation perceives itself.

Music has historically grown from its local roots, with genres like jazz, Motown, hip-hop, grunge, and house music all emerging from specific places before conquering global platforms.

Streaming has undoubtedly expanded opportunities for musicians, with 837 million paid subscription accounts worldwide in 2025, and every region recording revenue growth. Latin America saw a 17.1% increase, while the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa all grew by 15.2%. This is a remarkable achievement.

However, access and discovery are not the same things. When success is driven by engagement metrics, the focus shifts towards what can perform at scale. Artists learn what captures clicks, companies learn what keeps listeners engaged, and algorithms learn what similar audiences already enjoy. This process, driven by optimization, can gradually reward familiarity and diminish the importance of local venues and emerging musicians.

The paradox is clear: we have access to more music than any generation before, yet we might be losing the communities where distinctive new sounds are born. While artificial intelligence can lower production barriers and provide musicians with powerful creative tools, it is the industry's focus on maximizing engagement, scale, and efficiency that poses the real danger. If the industry continues to prioritize these metrics, technology will optimize for what they value, not for cultural identity.

The music industry should strive to build a digital economy where technology enhances local culture rather than gradually eroding it. Global platforms should become gateways to emerging scenes, exposing listeners not just to variations of what they already enjoy, but to distinct sounds originating in cities like Detroit, Lagos, Manchester, Seoul, San Juan, or others that the industry has yet to discover.

To achieve this, major streaming platforms should dedicate at least 10% of their editorial discovery placements in each market to locally curated emerging artists, and they should publicly report these placements annually. Local programmers, venues, and music communities should have a say in this discovery process, rather than being left to centralized metrics. This principle should become standard, ensuring that cultural development receives the same attention as engagement.

The future of music will not be safeguarded by resisting technology, but by deciding what we want technology to strengthen. While the best algorithm can predict what we will play next, it is communities that have the power to create something the world has never heard before. It is up to us to determine how technology should be used to amplify local music ecosystems, rather than gradually flattening them.