Steven McIntosh
Leisure reporter
Reuters
Spotify paid the tune business $10bn (£7.7bn) in 2024, which the streaming provider mentioned used to be the very best annual fee from any unmarried store in historical past.
However the figures come as a heated debate continues about how much cash artists and songwriters obtain in royalties.
Previous this yr, a number of Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted an awards match hosted by way of Spotify in a row about their streaming income.
As the brand new figures have been printed, a spokesperson for Spotify mentioned the accountability for distributing the cash it will pay lay with document labels and publishers.
The corporate mentioned it will pay royalties to rights holders, including that it does no longer have “visibility” on the place the cash in the end is going as a result of income are according to artists’ particular person contracts with their labels.
A spokesperson mentioned: “Spotify does no longer pay artists or songwriters without delay. We pay rights-holders, those are normally document labels, tune publishers, assortment societies.
“Those rights-holders then pay artists and songwriters according to their particular person agreements.”
The amount of cash earned by way of artists will range, however the BPI famous the typical royalty charge for UK artists signed to main labels used to be round 26%, consistent with a 2021 learn about from the Pageant and Markets Authority.
Consequently, the performer in the end earns about 16% of a move’s total worth.
On the other hand, Spotify isn’t the one streaming provider to generate income for artists, and plenty of pop stars earn more money from different source of revenue streams akin to reside excursions.
Reuters
Taylor Swift used to be Spotify’s maximum streamed artist globally in 2024
Spotify mentioned greater than two-thirds of all tune income is going “directly to the recording and publishing rights-holders”, and added that, like different streamers, Spotify does no longer pay on a per-stream foundation.
The once a year figures have been printed in Spotify’s Loud and Transparent file – a part of the corporate’s purpose to supply transparency on the way it will pay the tune business.
The quantity Spotify paid this yr used to be an building up at the greater than $9bn (£7bn) it passed over in 2023.
The file highlighted that the choice of artists producing annual royalties between $1,000 (£770) and $10m had tripled since 2017.
Taylor Swift used to be named Spotify’s best artist globally with greater than 26 billion streams, within the yr she launched her double-length album The Tortured Poets Division: The Anthology.
Swift herself used to be a part of the talk about streaming royalties in 2014, when she got rid of her tune from Spotify as a part of a boycott, sooner or later re-joining the platform in 2017.
More moderen artist boycotts have usually been precipitated by way of different elements, akin to Neil Younger and Joni Mitchell doing away with their tune over the streamer’s employment of podcast host Joe Rogan. Each artists returned to the platform final yr.
However dissatisfaction over streaming royalties continues.
A big-scale survey of musicians in Europe performed final yr discovered that about 70% have been unsatisfied with the quantity they have been paid in streaming income.
