Spotify said on Wednesday it paid $10 billion (€9.16 billion) in royalties in 2024, the largest payout to the music industry in a single year.
Nearly 1,500 artists earned over $1 million in royalties from Spotify last year, the Swedish streaming giant said. Spotify said its yearly payout to the music industry had risen tenfold from $1 billion in 2014.
The 2024 figure was revealed in the streaming provider’s 2025 Loud And Clear report, which says its payouts to rights-holders are now approaching $60 billion.
“Music fans streaming their favourite artists are directly fuelling their success and they are reshaping the industry,” a Spotify spokesperson said. “Thanks to streaming, more artists than ever before are generating royalties at every career stage, more than at any time in music history.”
There are now over 200 artists each generating more than $5 million a year from Spotify, up from just one act a decade ago, according to Sam Duboff, Spotify’s global head of marketing & policy, music business. He says the top 70 acts are generating at least $10 million each.
According to the report, Spotify’s 10,000th-ranked artist generated $131,000 last year – up from $34,000 a decade ago – and 1,500 acts each generated over $1 million in royalties in 2024.
The number of artists who have generated royalties from $1,000 to more than $10 million a year has tripled since 2017, it says.
But, with 225,000 “emerging or professional recording acts” on the service globally, that means just 4.4 per cent are generating at least $131,000 a year, while 0.6 per cent are in with a shot of generating $1 million or more.
Music streaming has been criticised by artists and musicians around the world, including Spotify’s bestseller Taylor Swift, who have claimed they make little money from it.
The music streaming provider says it does not have “visibility” on where the money goes, claiming it pays the record labels or publishers, which then pay artists and groups based on their individual contracts.
A spokesperson said: “Spotify does not pay artists or songwriters directly. We pay rightsholders. These are typically record labels, music publishers, collection societies. These rightsholders then pay artists and songwriters based on their individual agreements.
“Just like every other streaming service, roughly two-thirds of all of our music revenue goes straight to the recording and publishing rights-holders, and just like every other streaming service Spotify does not pay on a per-stream basis.
“Instead, if you have, say, 1 per cent of all streams, your rightsholders will receive 1 per cent of all the money we paid out. From there, the rightsholders divide up the money based on their individual contracts with the artists and songwriters who they represent.
“Once that money is paid out from Spotify, we do not have visibility into where it goes.”
Spotify was hit with a lawsuit in United States that accused the company of underpaying songwriting royalties for tens of millions of songs last year. A federal judge in New York ruled to dismiss that suit this year. – Reuters / PA / Guardian
