Spotify is trumpeting big paydays for artists – but only a tiny fraction of them are actually thriving

The Guardian

12-03-2025

Since 2021, Spotify has published its Loud & Clear report, corralling data points to show how much money is being earned by artists on the streaming service. There is much talk of 'transparency' – perhaps the most duplicitous word in the music industry's lexicon – but this year's report feels very different, coming as it does alongside the publication of author Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine, a studs-up assault on streaming economics in general and Spotify in particular.
Then there is the unfortunate timing of the news, as recently unearthed by Music Business Worldwide, that Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out close to $700m in shares in the company since 2023 while Martin Lorentzon, the company's other co-founder, cashed out $556.8m in shares in 2024 alone. Meanwhile artists scream of widening financial inequalities and accuse streaming services of doing better from artists than artists are doing from streaming services.
So there's a strange tang to the numbers being pushed today, as Spotify announces its 2024 report. 'We think [the report] helps us contribute to the larger understanding of what happened in music the year before,' says Spotify's Sam Duboff, who carries the unwieldy title of global head of marketing & policy, music business. It does contribute in that way, but only to a point.
Loud & Clear, just like Spotify Wrapped each December, is a marketing tool, trumpeting just how fantastic Spotify is. It proffers multiple talking points, the biggest being that Spotify – which claims it holds a quarter of the recorded music market globally – paid out $10bn in royalties last year (and almost $60bn in its lifetime).
Duboff says 2024's report is 'particularly symbolic, because it's exactly 10 years after the low point of the recorded music industry', when downloads had failed to fill the void created by the collapse of the CD market and the rise of piracy. He says Loud & Clear aims to show 'how many more artists are able to participate in the massive royalty pools' generated by streaming.
$10bn is a hefty number, but it needs to be closely examined. This money, around two-thirds of its total income, is what Spotify has paid through to record labels and music publishers. Spotify cannot be held responsible for egregious label and publisher contracts, but it needs reiterating that only a portion of that $10bn will make its way to the people who wrote and recorded the music.
The company also says this $10bn is 'more than any single retailer has ever paid in a year' and is '10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era'. That may be true, but it says less about Spotify's benevolence and more about how streaming's market share has mostly consolidated into the hands of four global heavyweights – Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Amazon.
Don't like those numbers? Spotify has others. Some land well. Others, when contextualised, land like a cake flung from the top of a skyscraper.
As with live music, a handful of megastars are sponging up most of the money. There are now over 200 artists each generating over $5m a year from Spotify, up from just one act a decade ago; Duboff says the top 70 acts are generating at least $10m each.
We get a better insight into the hard scrabble for smaller artists when Spotify says its 10,000th-ranked artist generated $131,000 last year – up from $34,000 a decade ago – and that 1,500 acts each generated over $1m in royalties in 2024. This is a heartening rise, but last year, Spotify said there were 225,000 'emerging or professional recording acts' (its terminology) on the service globally. That means just 4.4% of professional or near-professional acts stand a chance of generating at least $131,000 a year, while 0.6% are in with a shot of generating $1m or more. A solo act at this level might be encouraged by the potential income, but a band with four or five members will need to heavily rely on income from gigs and merchandise.
Spotify has asserted that 2024 was 'another record year' for songwriters, with $4.5bn paid to music publishers (who distribute royalty payments to songwriters) over the past two years. But given Spotify has been accused in the US, by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), of trying to reduce its payments to songwriters by reclassifying its premium subscriptions as 'bundles' as they contain access to audiobooks, this claim will not be warmly welcomed by everyone.
The MLC took legal action last May but in January this year a judge granted Spotify's motion to dismiss the lawsuit. 'The court agreed that Spotify Premium's definition as a bundle was accurate,' says Duboff. 'We added audiobooks, which has been a huge value to subscribers a year or two ago. All four major streaming services operate bundles and we're no different.'
To Spotify's credit, it publishes this report annually to allow everyone to pick through some of its (albeit carefully curated) numbers. None of the other streaming services do this, and record labels most certainly do not.
'Five years in, we always pictured all the streaming services would start reporting data like this,' says Duboff. 'It's a knowable fact how much each streaming service is paying out to the music industry. And we think artists deserve to know what the revenue opportunity on each platform is. It's crazy to me in 2025, with the amount of data available on the internet, that there still is so much that's opaque in the music industry.'
The music industry creates and benefits from this lack of transparency. Without record labels and publishers revealing exactly how much of this money flows to artists, Loud & Clear's numbers feel like fireworks sent up to draw our attention away from tombstones.