New research has backed fears that algorithms on music streaming services are making it difficult for new artists to break through.
It found Australian music was not being “killed” by AI, but these algorithms were creating barriers for emerging talent.
Last year, former Spotify chief economist Will Page released a report for the Australia Institute that showed a 30 percent drop in Australian artists in the top 10,000 artists streamed on major platforms between 2021 and 2024.
The Victorian Music Development Office subsequently commissioned Associate Professor Mohsin Malik from Swinburne University of Technology and Associate Professor Guy Morrow from the The University of Melbourne to “fact check’ the findings.
In a study report released this week, Malik and Morrow said the new work, focused on Spotify, found evidence of the algorithms “perpetuating conditions that make it difficult for less-established artists to break onto the scene”.
“Our findings indicate that AI‑generated Australian playlists heavily rely on global listening patterns,” they said.
“They are also less likely than editorial playlists to surface diverse or regionally specific music.
“AI recommendations accentuate US dominance by reproducing US tastes as global ‘norms’. This suggests the US, a much larger market than Australia and the other countries, generates a music footprint that dictates the global trends.”
The new research, conducted in February 2025, involved analysis of 2.27 million music tracks using Chartmetric’s real-time analytics platform.
The dataset included 12,333 artists and 5000 editorial and AI-mediated Spotify playlists from seven English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Jamaica.
“The AI playlists in our sample drew from only a quarter as many unique tracks as the editorial playlists,” the researcher said.
“This further shows how AI playlists, in general, are more concentrated and less likely to recommend local music.”
The research said AI’s tendency to recommend “familiar” music also favoured artists from dominant markets such as the US.
“In our sample, 77 percent of the US tracks were produced by ‘established artists’, representing three Chartmetric categories (legendary, superstar and mainstream),” the report said.
“In contrast, only 22 percent of Australian tracks were being produced by established artists. The artists behind the other 78 percent of Australian tracks are less likely to be recommended by AI algorithms.”
