Spotify continues its efforts to offer some transparency to musicians unhappy with its streaming rates. The company updated its Loud & Clear website today, offering a 2021 breakdown of some metrics for how artists, publishers and rights holders are actually making money from Spotify streams.
As you might expect, Spotify decides to highlight positive improvements over 2020 here. Spotify paid out over $7 billion to artists, labels, and the other moving parts of the music industry last year, up from $5 billion last year. Over 16,500 artist catalogs earned at least $50,000 in royalties in 2021, compared to 13,400 in 2020, and over 1,000 artists broke $1 million through Spotify streaming for the first time (compared to 870 artists who hit that peak last year achieved). Meanwhile, over 52,600 artists made at least $10,000 from Spotify streams in the past year, compared to 42,500 in 2020.
And like last year, there’s still a calculator where artists (and fans) can enter their monthly listeners or song streams to see how their stats compare to the rest of Spotify.
Of course, Spotify seems to be specifically picking numbers that show its contributions to the music industry in the best light — nothing on the Loud & Clear website portrays Spotify’s royalties as anything other than a net benefit to the industry, something musicians clearly don’t agree on (as a recent protest in LA shows).
Spotify’s website emphasizes these big wins, but is softer on putting the context of the far larger number of artists not raking in thousands of dollars from the streamer every year. According to Spotify, there are over 8 million artists on its platform, of which about 2.6 million have uploaded at least ten songs. And of those 2.6 million artists, just 165,000 average at least 10,000 streams per month — compared to the 52,600 artists Spotify says have made at least $10,000 through its platform over the past year, a gap that speaks for the range of success of the platform.
Overall growth is encouraging — but as Spotify grows in popularity, the relative numbers for “success” are shifting. And since Spotify splits revenue based on how well a song or artist compares to the rest of the platform, it doesn’t just matter how popular an artist’s catalog is — it’s how popular it is compared to everything else on it Spotify is. The company cites as an example that over 230,000 songs broke 1 million streams in 2021, which would have been a rare feat in the earlier days of the service when it had far fewer listeners.
Spotify’s increased transparency is a good thing, especially as the music industry continues to subject streaming platforms to increasing scrutiny over how they pay artists. But there’s still work to be done to turn the streaming music success into financial success for most artists on the platform.
Correction March 24, 12:10 p.m.: This article originally noted that Spotify failed to provide context for the total number of artists on its platform versus its revenue targets. This information was added to this post. We regret the mistake.