Why the charts are full of old songs - and so are your playlists

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Why the charts are full of old songs - and so are your playlists
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More music is being created than at any other time in human history. Every day, more than 100,000 songs, external are being submitted to streaming services.
And despite the deluge of AI music, external - Spotify says it has removed 75 million "spammy tracks" from its catalogue - real music still makes up most of our listening. The streaming service Deezer says AI accounts for just 0.5% of streams on its platform.
The problem for all those artists creating new music is that our listening habits increasingly show a love for nostalgia.
Luminate, an independent entertainment data and analytics company that tracks music, film, and television consumption first started tracking music streaming in 2008.
This year, it recorded that the streaming of current music (released less than 18 months ago) was significantly dwarfed by older music in both the UK and US.
In the first half of 2026, almost two thirds of the music played (about 60%) was released five or more years ago.
So, if we're stuck in a streaming rut, what's to blame?
Old vs new?
In the UK, most of us seem to be shunning new songs.
Eighteen of the year's top 20 bestselling songs, external were released 12 months ago, or earlier.
The year's eighth biggest hit is Zara Larsson's Lush Life, which originally came out in June 2015. Michael Jackson's Billie Jean (1983) is in 22nd place. Fleetwood Mac's Dreams (1977) is 30th.
It's a sign that, with practically every song ever recorded available at the press of a button, people are increasingly seeking out the classics - or what the music industry categorises as "deep catalogue".
It's a similar story in the US.
There, in the two most-played genres, R&B and Hip-Hop, external, about 60% of streams are old-school catalogue hits.
A 'drought' of new music in the UK Charts?
Even when current songs do break out, they themselves dominate streaming for weeks and even months.
Sam Fender and Olivia Dean's duet Rein Me In recently made UK chart history, spending a record-breaking 23 non-consecutive weeks at number one.
Likewise, in America, Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas has become the longest-running number one in US chart history.
The reality, of course, is that hits need to achieve "millions of streams a day, external" to reach the top of the charts.
But according to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, nearly two thirds of streams are of music recorded by "only the top 0.4% of artists, external".
As we increasingly cling on to our favourites, aspiring artists may be suffering.
What about grassroots music?
Even after a song has gone viral, some musicians say it can be hard to promote subsequent releases and sustain a career. A platform like TikTok isn't set up to boost artists, it's there to create viral moments around a single song.
"It's easier [today] for folks to be passive fans," noted J Erving, the founder of Raye's distribution company, Human Re Sources, in a recent interview with Billboard, external.
"For you to consider yourself broken [as a mainstream artist], people need to care about you beyond the song. Where is the connectivity? Are people really dialled in in a deeper way?"
It's a problem the music industry is keen to tackle.
Oliver Schusser, the Head of Apple Music, says his streaming service is working to champion "tomorrow's artists" in its curation.
"You know, we do the Super Bowl halftime show, we need to make sure that we still have performers in 10, 20, 30 years," he tells BBC News.
"Because if you look back at the performers we had in the last four years, they all started somewhere before they got to the world's biggest stage."
Other organisations like Sofar Sounds work exclusively with grassroots musicians, putting on intimate pop-up gigs in cities across the globe.
This October, its Shoreditch Sofar Fringe festival showcased a whole host of artists like East London rapper J Casa.
In an age of content oversaturation, Casa thinks there's something unique about a live performance.
Rather than hearing more of what they already know, Casa says audiences form "a lasting connection" with a new artist and their music.
Sofar is also launching its Human Discovery Movement, external campaign that aims to put music curation and discovery "back into human hands."
Music lovers can now text a "mystery number" and receive voice notes from Sofar's tastemakers with recommendations for new music worldwide.
Are streaming platforms preaching to the choir?
Artificial intelligence (AI) may also be playing its part in the so-called death of new music.
Spotify, and its competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music, are driving the trend in AI-assisted curation, allowing premium subscribers to automatically generate playlists through text prompts to fit a mood, vibe or occasion.
Musicologist Anna-Kaisa Kaila thinks "there absolutely is potential for bias" with AI-generative playlist technology.
"With AI systems, the bias can either come from the data or from the system itself. If there's not enough training data in a particular style that is perhaps not so commercially dominant, it will be that much harder for the system to pull up tracks in that style."
Others fear an algorithmic streaming bubble is to the detriment of genuine music, its discovery and creatives' livelihoods.
As Tim Garcia, London-based DJ and curator puts it: "They're based on everyone's listening behaviour and data, right? So, you're probably going to get given a very similar recommendation to an artist you're already listening to."
Dan Mackta, managing director at Qobuz, an online music platform that maintains a strict human-first approach to curation, agrees the technology "is never going to want to throw a curve ball at you".
Chiminyo, a London-based independent artist, believes that auto-generated playlists are also misleading people into thinking they're listening to "hand-picked" tunes from bona fide artists - as opposed to digitally mass-produced sound-alikes created to catch streams.
Scrolling through a "relaxing jazz piano playlist" with over 370,000 saves on Spotify, he spots that top featured artists that rack up hundreds of thousands of monthly listens have unverified accounts.
Little - if anything - can be found about them online, he says.
To his trained ear, Chiminyo also says the different artists' tracks sound near identical, reason enough to conclude the compositions have been synthetically mass-produced.
"Its all the same: the same piano feel, the same microphone placement, the same tape machine, has been used on every single one of these tracks."
When asked, Spotify said it had rolled out platform-wide policies, external against impersonation and is working to the improve filtering out of AI-related issues on its platform. But it acknowledges AI's use in music production sits on a spectrum with some artists choosing to use it to varying degrees.
New music may not be dying out, but it's clear it has a lot to contend with in 2026.
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  - Published26 January 2025

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