Your Streaming Numbers No Longer Mean What They Used To
Ron Perry, who runs Columbia Records, one of the largest record labels in the world, recently went on record with some remarkable statements. Earlier this year, he told Billboard that TikTok “made things go faster for a small period of time” and that “we’re back to how things have always been.” In this volatile and uncertain climate, people are seriously paying attention when a major label executive releases statements that are this far removed from the usual label interview.
The TikTok era, as framed by the head of one of the biggest labels in the world, was a blip. Perry is talking directly about music discovery. For a period, TikTok became the primary route to visibility for any artist trying to break through. A short clip catches fire, an algorithm pushes it to millions of feeds, streams follow, and label interest tracks the streams. That sequence felt, for a few years, like a legitimate path to a career. His point is that it was never a solid foundation. Attention arrived, often at real scale. Discovery happened. The lasting relationship with fans, in most cases, did not.
Around the same time, SoundCloud published its Music Intelligence Report for 2026. It centred around listener behaviour data, published by a platform with deep ties to the independent scene and no particular reason to reach any of the same conclusions as the major label system. One finding of the report really stood out. Listeners who discover tracks through another user’s Liked By section are more than three times as likely to engage with that music, whether liking, reposting, or commenting, than listeners who arrive at the same track through any algorithmic recommendation. The Liked By mechanism is not an algorithm surfacing content to whoever fits a demographic. It is one listener, whose taste someone already follows, sharing something that they genuinely rate. That is real time community curation, peer recommendations within a scene, and it produces engagement at three times the rate of algorithmic delivery. Perry’s “how things have always been” and SoundCloud’s Liked By data are describing the same model from different vantage points.
These two insights came from completely different worlds. Different ends of the spectrum if you like, Perry was talking about artist development and label philosophy. SoundCloud was measuring what its users actually do on a Tuesday afternoon. Neither was responding to the other, and yet both have arrived at the same place, community engagement matters more than reach. Genuine fans matter more than raw numbers, and the algorithmic model that defined music discovery for the last decade is being questioned simultaneously from the top of the industry down and the bottom of it, up.
That kind of convergence is not a coincidence. What it tells you is that the measure of artist value has already shifted. It’s no longer streams or viral moments. It’s whether real people care about the music, show up on their own terms, and come back. The music industry’s measurement criteria are moving.
About the Author
Ron Pye is the CEO and Managing Director of IQ Artist Management, a music management and consultancy company working with established artists across the UK. He holds an MA in Music Industry Studies from the University of Liverpool, awarded with Distinction in 2024, and a BA in Music Business and Finance from the University of Middlesex.
Years of working directly with artists on the business side of their careers have given him a clear picture of where streaming figures and real commercial return line up, and with increasing importance, where they fall apart. In 2025 he successfully challenged a fraudulent copyright claim that removed Peshay’s iconic 1996 Studio Set from YouTube, a case that drew coverage from DJ Mag, Mixmag, and Resident Advisor.
His writing covers the practical and financial realities that define what a music career actually looks like from the inside, drawing on direct management experience rather than industry commentary from a distance.
When the people running the industry all said the same thing
Perry wasn’t alone either.
Peter Edge runs RCA Records. In the 2026 Billboard Power 100, he also said this: “In a world obsessed with virality, we really believe artist development is the foundation of who we are and will continue to be our strength.” He names virality directly, then sets it aside. That kind of statement from someone running one of the biggest labels in pop is extraordinary. Edge is not saying virality no longer exists or has no value, he’s saying virality is a tool. He is also saying RCA does not build careers based on it.
Lyor Cohen ranks at #7 on the list and oversees music at YouTube. His stated mission for 2026 is “moving casual listeners into forever fans.” Fan curation, in his words, is “a huge tool for music discovery.” Views and reach don’t feature anywhere in his statement, creating committed fans does.
Oliver Schusser, who runs Apple Music, also said something that deserves a lot more attention. “We are worried that at the end of the day, streaming is just a jukebox in the sky.” Apple Music helped build that jukebox. YouTube built a large part of the infrastructure around it. Both Cohen and Schusser are now, on the record, expressing concern about what that model has produced. Schusser went even further: “We’re in the music business at Apple because we love music. That’s why we created these spaces and moments for artists to express themselves and connect with their fans.” Both men helped construct the infrastructure that is now producing the passive consumption problem they are publicly worried about. Neither has been asked to explain that. The algorithmic models will continue to drive streams efficiently enough. What they don’t reliably produce is any kind of measurable long lasting relationship between an artist and a listener.
Avery Lipman at Republic Collective, number 13 on the same list, put it more bluntly than most: “Artistry and authenticity always win.”
For all the talk of philosophy, one company had already made the operational decision. HYBE, in at number 30, is the clearest proof that this is not just talk. Their entire global expansion, regional hubs across the US, Latin America, China, and India, runs on K-pop fandom development rather than algorithmic reach. And it operates at seriously massive scale.
The consensus also extends beyond the Power 100 list. In the IFPI’s Global Music Report for 2026, Samira Leitmannstetter of Warner Music Group said: “Sustainability versus a short moment of virality is very key for artists.” Victoria Oakley, the IFPI’s CEO, confirmed that superfans had “cemented their position” as a structural priority for the industry. Not one label or one list. The global industry body and the third major group saying the same thing in the same year.
These are not coordinated statements. They are reactive assessments of what the market has been showing each of those executives separately. And, now they are all saying it publicly.
What listeners were doing while no one was looking
While executives were recalibrating what they were going to say publicly, listeners just carried on behaving. SoundCloud’s Music Intelligence Report for 2026 is the bottom half of the same broad picture. The executives described a shift in how they think about artist value. SoundCloud’s report shows the same shift is already happening in how ordinary listeners behave.
It’s worth noting that SoundCloud has a commercial interest in the conclusions its data supports. Positioning community discovery as superior to algorithmic reach benefits the platform directly, after all, sharing on the platform is what they want you to do. It doesn’t discredit the report in any way, but any data published by a platform with a stake in the outcome deserves to be fully acknowledged.
According to Soundcloud, scenes build through what the report calls “social interactivity on the platform.” Reposts, comments, and shared social signals rather than any algorithmic promotion or genre tagging. Nobody at SoundCloud and nobody on the Power 100 sat in the same room to agree on that framing. They just described what they were observing from opposite ends of the industry.
The UK data in the report makes it concrete. Streams of UK underground rap grew by nearly 300% in 2025, driven by what the report describes as “community and cross-scene influence.” Artists like EsDeeKid and fakemink, both named in the report, started their careers on SoundCloud. They built their early momentum there, and went on to become, in the report’s own words, “the hottest acts in hip-hop.” So, the community came first, everything else followed from it.
SoundCloud listeners spend 43% of their listening time on new music, compared to around 24% across the broader industry patterns. The inference being platforms built around community appear to produce different listener behaviour, not just different discovery pathways. Listeners have also broadened their tastes, the same report finds they are 4% less confined to a single genre than they were back in 2019.
The report also draws a direct contrast. SoundCloud’s platform model differs from platforms “where discovery is driven by algorithms, AI, and trends influenced from the top down.” That is, without naming them directly, a pretty accurate description of the platforms and the era that Ron Perry just publicly said is over.
What the consumer research had already measured
In a survey of more than 10,000 global consumers published in September 2025, 52% of respondents said they’d streamed music in the last month after hearing it on social media. MIDiA Research, who ran the study, called their report “All Eyes, No Ears.” What MIDiA were measuring, and what the industry had largely avoided measuring, was whether any of that social media reach was actually converting into genuine listening behaviour. The answer, it turned out, was it was to an extent, but not consistently.
The same MIDiA survey also measured where consumers discover their music. YouTube leads at 52% of respondents. TikTok sits at 37%. For a platform that spent several years being positioned as the dominant force in music discovery, that gap is worth noting. Being where something briefly becomes impossible to avoid is not the same as being where most people go to find music.
Twenty percent of people who found an artist through TikTok went on to follow them on the platform. And of that group, only 26% then listened to more of that artist’s music. Around one in three of TikTok users have ever hit the ‘Add to Music App’ button, the one marketing mechanism that’s supposed to turn a viral clip into a stream.
TikTok’s core users, the 16 to 24 age group, were found to be less likely than the 25 to 34 group to do almost anything with the music that they found on there. In effect, the platform’s most engaged demographic converted at the least reliable rate. The 16 to 24 age group are TikTok’s most active, most engaged users. If the platform was going to convert attention into genuine fandom anywhere, it should have been with them. The fact that an older, less TikTok-native demographic outperformed them at every stage is not a marginal finding, or data outlier. It suggests the conversion issue was not about familiarity with the platform. It was structural.
The reach was certainly happening. The gained relationship was not. You could call it attention at scale, conversion at a trickle. I’ve watched a lot of artists go viral on TikTok and convert almost nothing from it. Half a million views, streams up for a week, then gone. No lasting audience, no new show demand, no evidence anyone actually cared beyond the thirty seconds. One artist I know personally went viral when she was 17 and is only now going on her first support tour. She’s 21 in August 2026.
What makes this matter most is the timing. The MIDiA report landed in September 2025. By early 2026, the Billboard Power 100 interviews and the IFPI report had followed. The consumer data was already there, already showing the same patterns the executives have outlined, months before any of those statements were made. Consumer research had been capturing the conversion failure as it unfolded. What changed massively in 2026 was that the people running the music industry came out and said it publicly.
The MIDiA data was measuring whether social media attention converted into streams. For around half of respondents, it did. But the streams those artists were accumulating were landing in a royalty pool that was being diluted at the same time, and for reasons that had nothing to do with discovery or fandom.
A metric being hollowed out from two directions at once
Streaming royalties work on a pro rata business model. All subscription and ad revenue is combined, then distributed based on an artist’s percentage of total platform streams.
In January 2026, Deezer reported 60,000 AI-generated songs landing on its platform every single day. That’s 39% of all daily uploads. By April 2026, it was 75,000 tracks and 44% of uploads. Eighty-five percent of streams on those tracks were fraudulent. Apple Music recently reported that they’d demonetised 2 billion fraudulent streams across 2025. They have taken significant steps to block roughly $17 million from reaching fraudsters gaming the system. The faster the pool fills with AI content, the smaller the cut per play for every human artist in it. Oliver Schusser, whose jukebox quote appeared earlier in this piece, has described the streaming economy quite plainly as “a zero-sum game.”
AI content and fraudulent streams are eroding the royalty value of every legitimate stream from below. More tracks are also now competing for the same pool of money. A large proportion of those streams are fraudulent, AI-generated, or both. So, the upshot is the payout per stream for a human artist making legitimate music keeps on shrinking.
From above, at the same time, the executives running the biggest operations in music are saying publicly that streaming numbers no longer tell them what they need to know. Ron Perry called the TikTok era a blip. Peter Edge said virality was not the foundation he’d built his label on. Cohen’s stated priority is converting casual listeners into forever fans. And Oakley confirmed superfans as the structural priority at the industry body level.
The streaming number, the very metric artists have spent a decade being told to chase, is now being discredited from two directions at once. I’ve spoken to artists with anything up to 200,000 monthly Spotify listeners and nothing to show for it beyond the number itself. No label interest, if that’s what they wanted, and no management conversations going anywhere meaningful. Theres’s even been no booking agent willing to commit. The streaming number looks credible on paper, but everything that you would have expected to follow just wasn’t there. From the top, the executives running the biggest labels and platforms are saying publicly that streams no longer demonstrate real audience worth. From the bottom, AI-generated content is flooding the platforms, splitting the royalty pool further with every track added, and eroding the financial value of every play.
Edge was talking about artist development. Cohen was talking about converting casual listeners into forever fans. Oakley was talking about superfans. Leitmannstetter was talking about sustainability over a short moment of virality. Strip the different language away and they are all describing the same thing, a real, lasting relationship between an artist and an audience that chose to be there. That is a community. Genuine fans who care about the music without needing an algorithm to surface it for them. Proof that an audience exists and shows up on its own terms.
Traditional artist development had a clear shape. A label identified someone with potential, funded the process of building their audience through advances, A&R support, and marketing spend, and committed to that investment on the basis that the return would follow. Discovering the talent was the label’s job. Developing it was the label’s financial risk. What the current consensus from executives appears to be describing, whether they intend to frame it this way or not, is a shift in where that starting point sits. An artist is now expected to arrive with community already in place, with proof that a real audience exists, before any of that investment is committed. The question of who bears the cost of building that proof, and on what terms, is one the industry has been notably quiet about.
Whether a major label deal is your goal or not, the work is the same. Build an audience that cares about the music and give them reasons to keep on coming back. None of that changes with the destination.
What does change is what you have when it’s done. An artist who has built an audience that shows up on its own terms to spend hard earned money, without algorithmic prompting or label marketing budgets, has something the industry now publicly says it values above almost everything else. The executives making these statements are asking artists to do the development work that used to be the label’s financial responsibility. Once an artist has actually done that, the question of whether they need those labels becomes a genuinely open one. That is not a question the reports quoted in this piece seem particularly interested in addressing.
