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By Randy Dominguez
Executive Producer
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Music has never traveled farther or faster. A song created in a bedroom can reach listeners across continents within hours, while streaming has effectively placed decades of recorded music in our pockets.
The business is thriving, too. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the trade organization representing the global recording industry, global recorded music revenue reached a record $31.7 billion in 2025, with streaming accounting for more than 69 percent of the total.
Yet beneath that extraordinary growth is a question the industry should take more seriously: As music becomes bigger, is its culture becoming smaller?
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Music Detached From the Place That Created It
I believe the greatest threat to music is not artificial intelligence. It is an industry increasingly conditioned to value scale above culture. Streams, followers, engagement rates, and viral moments have become convenient measures of success. They tell us how far something has traveled. They cannot tell us whether it created a movement, strengthened a community, or changed the way a generation understood itself.
That distinction matters because music has historically grown from places before it conquered platforms. Jazz was inseparable from New Orleans. Motown carried Detroit with it. Hip-hop emerged from communities in the Bronx. Grunge became identified with Seattle. House music grew from Chicago’s club culture.
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These movements became global precisely because they began with something intensely local: musicians influencing one another, venues willing to take risks, audiences gathering around a sound, and communities developing identities that could not have been manufactured by a marketing department.
Streaming has undeniably expanded opportunity. IFPI reported 837 million paid subscription accounts worldwide in 2025, and every global region recorded revenue growth. Latin America grew 17.1 percent, while the Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa each grew 15.2 percent. That is worth celebrating. Technology has allowed artists to cross borders that once required enormous distribution networks to overcome.
Algorithms, Optimization and Familiarity Combine
But access and discovery are not the same thing. When success is increasingly filtered through engagement metrics, the incentive naturally shifts toward whatever can perform at scale. Artists learn what attracts clicks. Companies learn what keeps listeners engaged. Algorithms learn what resembles something audiences already enjoy. None of this requires malicious intent to create a cultural problem. Optimization itself can gradually reward familiarity.
The consequences could be significant. Music may become an enormous global marketplace offering almost unlimited choice while increasingly steering listeners toward variations of what has already succeeded. Local venues could weaken, emerging musicians could lose spaces to experiment, and regional scenes may struggle to develop enough momentum to become genuine movements.
The paradox is difficult to ignore: We could have access to more music than any generation in history while gradually losing the communities where distinctive new sounds are actually born.
Don't Blame AI
Artificial intelligence could accelerate that pressure. It can lower production barriers and give musicians remarkable creative tools. But blaming AI misses the deeper problem. Technology follows the incentives we create for it. If the industry asks technology primarily to maximize engagement, scale, and efficiency, that is what technology will optimize.
Greater scale should not come at the expense of cultural identity. The music industry should build a digital economy in which technology extends the reach of local culture rather than gradually flattening it. Global platforms should become gateways into emerging scenes, exposing listeners not simply to variations of what they already enjoy, but to distinctive sounds taking shape in Detroit, Lagos, Manchester, Seoul, San Juan, or cities the industry has yet to notice.
Technology should not compete with local music ecosystems. It should give them a larger stage.
That requires a measurable change. Major streaming platforms should dedicate at least 10 percent of their editorial discovery placements in each market to locally curated emerging artists and publicly report those placements annually. Local programmers, venues, and music communities should help inform that discovery rather than leaving it entirely to centralized metrics.
The percentage can evolve, but the principle should become standard: cultural development deserves a measurable place alongside engagement.
The future of music will not be secured by resisting technology. It will be secured by deciding what we want technology to strengthen. The best algorithm may predict what we will play next. Only communities can create something the world has never heard before.
Randy Dominguez is Executive Producer of The Jersey Sound, a media platform which sells advertising to venues, promoters and music businesses, and documents New Jersey’s music culture through artist interviews, historical features, and coverage of emerging musicians.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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