LOS ANGELES (AP) – Spotify paid out USD9 billion in streaming royalties last year, the streaming giant said yesterday in its latest “Loud and Clear” report.
Spotify’s fourth annual report, which originally launched in 2021 following criticism over its lack of transparency, noted record accomplishments, including the highest annual payment from any retailer to the music industry.
“This is everything we know about how much is being paid out, how many artistes are achieving different levels of success,” said Spotify vice president and global head of music product Charlie Hellman. “So, everyone can have access to the information and be sort of up to date with the state of the industry.”
According to the data, 1,250 artistes generated over USD1 million each in recording and publishing royalties in 2023; 11,600 generated over USD100,000 and 66,000 generated over USD10,000 – numbers that have almost tripled since 2017.
More than half of those 66,000 artistes came from countries where English is not the primary language, the report said, reflecting an increasingly global music landscape.
And indie artistes – the self-distributed, do-it-yourself (DIY) acts and those on independent record labels, according to Hellman – accounted for USD4.5 billion, half of all royalties paid out by Spotify.
“There are millions of people who’ve uploaded a song at least once but that doesn’t really speak to whether they’re an artiste, or if they’re doing this more as a hobby,” Hellman said.
Spotify zooms in on artistes that have “at least put up an album’s worth of music once they seem to have some indication that they’re trying to build a fan base.” He estimated there are “about 225,000 professionally aspiring artistes” on the platform.
“They have a little bit of a following. They might, you know, have gigs listed on Spotify or things like that,” he said.
In December, Spotify announced it was axing 17 per cent of its global workforce, the music streaming service’s third round of layoffs in 2023 as it moved to slash costs while focusing on becoming profitable.
The previous month, Spotify announced it would eliminate payments for songs with less than 1,000 annual streams, starting in 2024.
“Songs that generate less than a thousand streams in a year would be generating pennies, a few cents in royalties,” Hellman explained. “So what we’re seeing was that there was an increasing amount of uploaders that had USD0.03, USD0.08, USD0.36 sitting there.”
