Your Spotify Wrapped Isn’t Fun For the Artists You Stream
“Hell yeah! Spotify Wrapped is back, baby! I love to see my yearly stats! It’s so much fun!” For you, maybe. But not for the artists.
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming service. It’s one of the biggest streaming services in the world, boasting 590 million active users. In 2022, the company reported 11.7 billion Euros in revenue ($12.77 billion). Their co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, has a net worth of $3.2 billion. That’s an insane amount of money. So with over 100 million songs streaming on Spotify, artists must be raking it in, right?
Lol. No.
Earlier this year, Ditto put together this piece on how much Spotify pays artists per stream. Here are the numbers, straight from the piece:
Spotify pays artists between $0.003 – $0.005 per stream on average.
That works out as an approximate revenue split of 70/30 – so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify.
And as Ditto reminds us, the rights holders of a song can include the publisher, songwriter and the master recording owners, which is sometimes the record label.
Your Spotify Wrapped Isn’t Fun For the Artists You Stream
It’s almost comical, really. A guy worth north of $3 billion running a company that raked in over $12 billion last year is paying the artists who’s songs he’s streaming fractions of fractions of a cent for their art. I mean, let’s call it what it is: Spotify is stealing money from artists by not paying them fairly for their music. And those of us that use the platform are complicit in that.
So as you pour over your Spotify Wrapped statistics, keep these stats from Produce Like A Pro in mind: On average, artists need 300,000 to 350,000 streams to make $1000. But, as they put it, “streams are not created equally: The actual number of streams needed to earn $1000 can range anywhere from 150,000 on the low side to 600,000 on the high side.”
I’m not expecting you to abandon Spotify; I’m no fool. The convenience is too much of a draw and once you form a habit it’s hard to break it. I just want you to be aware of the actual cost of your convenience. And urge you to balance those scales by supporting the artists you stream in other ways: buy their records and merch. Directly from the artists and labels when you’re able.
Bandcamp is an excellent compromise. Sadly, the platform has been bought and sold by venture capitalists two times over in the last year or so, so their future is up in the air. But I’ve been using it for years to discover artists and to stream and purchase music from those artists because Bandcamp’s business model puts the most money in the hands of independent artists and labels.
Check out my page here. And be on the lookout for Bandcamp Friday. On the first Friday of most months, Bandcamp forgoes their cut to put 100% of revenue from sales of music and merch into the hands of artists and labels. Those are some numbers we can all get behind.