Spotify announces record-breaking payout to artists in annual report
LOS ANGELES
Spotify paid out $9 billion in streaming royalties to artists 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.
According to the data, 1,250 artists generated over $1 million each in recording and publishing royalties in 2023; 11,600 generated over $100,000 and 66,000 generated over $10,000, numbers that have almost tripled since 2017.
“Indie” artists, which are the self-distributed acts and those on independent record labels, according to Charlie Hellman, the vice president and global head of music product at Spotify, accounted for $4.5 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 artist, or if they’re doing this more as a hobby,” Hellman, says.
Spotify zooms in on artists 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 estimates there are “about 225,000 professionally aspiring artists” on the platform.
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 explains.
For those DIY artists, there's a minimum threshold to withdraw money from a distributor, $5.35 at DistroKid and $1 at TuneCore, two such distributors, and Hellman argues the withdrawal fees would eclipse the royalties.
Spotify pays royalties to the rights holders of the music on its platform, a number which is determined by streamshare. That's calculated by adding up how many times music owned or controlled by a particular rights holder was streamed and dividing by the total number of streams in that market.
Larger rights holders have a larger percentage of the market share and a listener streaming an artist 25% of the time does not mean the act receives 25% of the listener's subscription fee.
“All those pennies sitting in bank accounts all over the place was siphoning money away from artists that were really doing this, as an aspiring professional," says Hellman of the decision. "And so, those royalties are now being put in the pot so that they can be redirected to artists that are getting more than a thousand streams a year.”