An industry waiting to bloom: using technology to answer what technology changed

Music is becoming an industry of waiting for things to bloom. Planting has never been cheaper: in 2025, global audio streaming platforms added about 106,000 new songs a day.¹ By June 2026, more than half of the new songs Deezer received each day were fully AI-generated.²

But fewer and fewer of them bloom. In 2025, 88% of songs on streaming platforms got fewer than 1,000 plays all year.¹ On Spotify, a recording with fewer than 1,000 plays in the past 12 months doesn't earn recording royalties at all.³

Capital only arrives after the bloom. Mature catalogues trade at more than 17 times earnings; younger catalogues at clearly less.⁴ And for musicians at the very start, money tends to go out long before any comes in, as we documented in Listening to 300 musicians.⁵

Technology caused this imbalance, and it may also help fix it. This report sets out three structural shifts and how Asynflow uses data, valuation and settlement technology so that the waiting period itself can be supported.

Planting has never been easier

In 2025, global audio streaming platforms added about 106,000 songs a day, 7% more than the 99,000 a day in 2024. 96.2% of them came through independent or self-release channels.¹ The fastest growth was in AI-generated songs:

New songs keep multiplying, but listening hasn't grown with them. AI music makes up only 1–3% of plays on Deezer, and in 2025 up to 85% of plays on AI songs were flagged as fraudulent.² Yet listeners can barely tell the difference: in a blind test of 9,000 people across 8 countries, 97% couldn't distinguish AI music from human music.² CISAC, the international confederation of authors' societies, estimates that nearly a quarter of creators' income is at risk by 2028.²

Behind these numbers is a worry we heard again and again in our interviews: the more songs there are, the harder it is for any one of them to be remembered.⁵

Capital only pays for what has already bloomed

Music rights are now a mature asset class, but the money flows almost entirely to older works with steady income. In 2025, valuation firm Citrin Cooperman priced 566 catalogues with a combined value of nearly $13 billion, about $23 million each on average.⁴

The key to the price is certainty:

• Older recording catalogues, and combined recording and publishing catalogues, trade at more than 17 times.
• Younger recording catalogues average about 13.7 times.
• The older the work, the steadier its decline in income, and the easier it is to predict.⁴

That logic makes sense for mature work, but it shuts early-career artists out: no income history means no basis for a price, and no price means no money.

Answering technology with technology

Technology is what made songs multiply, and technology can also make the wait something people can support. Asynflow is working on three specific problems:

• First, tell real from fake. AI detection now works at platform scale; Deezer reports 99.8% accuracy.² Before a song enters Asynflow it goes through an originality review and identity checks, so money reaches real artists.
• Then, set a price. We don't try to predict hits. We treat play data, which changes daily, separately from real income, which settles every few months: the first shows the trend, the second sets the baseline. That is the dual time scale behind the MFRR valuation method.
• Finally, settle on what's real. Prices don't follow play counts; they follow income that has actually arrived. After each period's income is paid out under the contract, it flows back into the model to calibrate the next valuation.

Valuation isn't a one-off judgement but a mechanism that real income keeps correcting. The more it is used, the more accurate it gets.

It's the opposite of how catalogue acquisitions work. An acquisition buys the whole plant after it has bloomed. Asynflow lets a musician offer a small share of future income for money today, before the bloom, while keeping their rights. Supporters become more than listeners: they wait for the bloom alongside the artist.