The Great Streaming Purge begins! Deezer tosses 26M ‘useless’ tracks
Music streamer Deezer recently deleted 26 million tracks from its platform. Keep reading to find out what was deleted and how this may affect music streaming and royalties.
by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
Streaming companies have been threatening this for a while, but it’s finally come to pass. Deezer has recently purged 26 million of what it terms as “useless” audio tracks from its service. While “useless” may seem a bit harsh, most of the tracks that the company deleted probably deserved it, since ultimately it has led to a bad user experience.
Considering that Deezer has over 200 million tracks in its catalog (which is what most of the other streaming services have as well), 26 million represents 13% if what’s available. In all honesty, I don’t think anyone will miss these tracks one bit.
What Was Deleted
The tracks that were removed include noise tracks, mono-track albums [albums made of copies of a single track], fake artists, and tracks that haven’t been listened to in the past 12 months.
That last category is a bit contentious, because until now, if you uploaded a track to a streaming service you probably thought that it might be there forever. Online services don’t work that way though, and a policy change often comes at the drop of a hat, which is why it’s best to never trust an online service as the only repository for your content and contacts.
That said, artists have to start realizing that just because you created a song, it doesn’t mean that anyone will listen. And if they don’t there will probably be consequences similar to what just happened with Deezer.
The Streaming Game Is Changing
There’s some talk about charging you to keep a track on a service if it’s under a certain number of plays per year. In fact, Spotify is now getting close to that, as it will no longer pay royalties on a track unless its received 1,000 plays in the last 12 months.
With 100,000 new tracks being uploaded to Deezer (and each of the other streaming services) every day, there’s an enormous amount of competition for the limited time in the day that listeners have. Some of these tracks will never be heard, especially if they don’t meet the minimum requirements to stay on the streaming platform. Expect other streaming platforms to follow Deezer’s lead.
Bobby Owsinski is a producer/engineer, author, blogger, podcaster, and coach. He has authored 24 books on recording, music, the music business and social media.
