Spotify has updated all the stats on its Loud & Clear website, bragging about the fact it paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry last year, bringing “lifetime payouts to nearly $70 billion”. And, it’s keen to stress, “these payouts aren’t concentrated to a small number of superstar artists: once again, roughly half of royalties were generated by independent artists and labels”.
More than 1500 artists now make more than a million a year in Spotify royalties, we’re also told, and “many of them aren’t household names and may never trend globally”. And even the 100,000th highest-earning artist earned more than $7300 in Spotify royalties last year, which is all the more notable because ten years ago “the artist in that same position generated about $350”.
The Loud & Clear site really exists to placate the wider music community through a combination of stat bragging - “look at all the money and support we’re providing for artists” - and education - “you might hate us less if you understand the business model”.
Given Spotify’s critics in the artist community have become increasingly vocal in the last couple of years, things like Loud & Clear are all the more important. The site’s new mission statement on its home page says “artists deserve transparency about how music streaming works”, and “this site shares data behind Spotify’s royalty payments and explains how money flows through the global streaming economy”.
Of course, Loud & Clear has existed since 2021 and hasn’t stopped any of the backlashing or boycotts that we’ve seen since then.
But the facts and figures published on the site can be more used more generally by Team Spotify to try to counter some of the misleading narratives that sometimes circulate about streaming: like that only superstars make any money, or that Spotify pays significantly lower royalties than its competitors, or that streaming basically pays next to nothing into the music industry.
The top level stats, under the header “the $11 billion+ growth engine”, obviously seek to counter the ‘streaming doesn’t pay’ narrative. “Payouts increased by more than 10%”, last year, Spotify declares, and that’s “more than double the rate of other music industry income sources”.
These numbers, it adds, “reflect Spotify’s central role in today’s music economy: Not only as the largest platform for artists and the largest source of recorded music revenue, but also as the largest driver of the industry’s continued growth”.
And it’s not just recording artists and record labels that benefit, Spotify is keen to add. Despite the streaming service employing sneaky audiobook bundling tactics to reduce payouts to songwriters and music publishers under the US compulsory licence (something Loud & Clear always avoids talking about), the total royalties paid to writers and publishers “have grown dramatically”, we’re told.
In fact payments to the publishing side of the music industry have increased 2.5 times in the past five years, which means “over the past two years alone, Spotify paid approximately $5 billion to the publishers and organisations representing songwriters”.
To counter the ‘only superstars benefit’ claim, each year Spotify organises artists on its platform into revenue-level groups, and then tells us that there are more artists in the higher earning groups than ever before. So, last year “there were more than 13,800 artists who generated at least $100,000 a year from Spotify alone”, which is “nearly 1400 more than last year”.
Seeking to put those stats into perspective, Spotify goes on, “there are now more artists generating over $100k a year from Spotify alone than were getting stocked on record store shelves at the height of the CD era”, and “more than one in three artists at the $100k level today have increased their royalties tenfold in under a decade”.
Some of the misleading narratives around Spotify in particular and streaming more generally stem from a misunderstanding about how the streaming business model works. And, with the latest redesign, the educational resources on Loud & Clear do seem to be more clearly sign-posted.
Among other things, those resources subtly explain that artists may receive relatively low streaming royalties because a label takes the majority of the money their recordings generate. And songwriters may receive low pay-outs because the money is getting lost somewhere in the often complex royalty chains that the money flows along between Spotify and the individual songwriter.
That said, neither the stats nor the educational resources tackle some of the big Spotify gripes within the artist community - including those relating to the audiobook bundling tricks, or the payout threshold that means millions of artists now receive no royalties at all, or the ICE ads that ran on Spotify in the US.
And while more artists may be making more money than ever before via Spotify - and significantly more than in the CD era - the streaming business model does still work best for superstars and big catalogue owners who easily achieve millions of streams every month. Which means for many artists, streaming remains a modest income stream.
But maybe, for at least some of those artists, Spotify can help sell some tickets, by plugging shows and ticket links to its users. “By the first half of 2025, Spotify had driven $1 billion in gross concert ticket sales for artists - that total has now exceeded $1.5 billion”, the final section of Loud & Clear tells us.
“The financial impact of streaming doesn’t stop with royalties”, it goes on, “it helps turn everyday listeners into ticket buyers”. Which is great. Though given the economics of touring at the grassroots level and even for mid-tier artists, that’s not necessarily as big a help as it initially sounds.
