Spotify: $10B payout in 2024; $60B lifetime — indie artists highlighted in a raft of metrics

Spotify has released a Music Economics Report for 2024. In it, we see interesting metrics about the platform’s reach, payouts to participating artists, metrics pertaining to songwriters and composers, and the elite class of Spotify millionaires.

Here is the mission statement:

“Artists deserve clarity about the economics of music streaming. This site aims to increase transparency by sharing new data on Spotify’s royalty payments and breaking down the global streaming economy, the players, and the process.” — Spotify, Music Economics Report

Spotify’s biggest brag in this piece is a 2024 payout of $10 billion. Tha is a hefty one-sixth of Spotify’s lifetime payouts of $60 billion. Spotify posits those metrics as the largest in music industry history, and more than ten times revenue of the largest (unnamed) record store at the height of the CD era.

Spotify offers an “all boats rising” graphic to illustrate payout growth across a decade — except it’s just Spotify’s boat.

Spotify makes an egalitarian effort to demonstrate and quantify value for participating artists across many levels. For example, this:

” The number of artists generating royalties at every threshold has at least tripled since 2017″ — Spotify, Music Economics Report

Again, evangelizing long-tail artists in Spotify, the report makes this point:

And some granular context for the metric above: “During that same time period, the 10,000th-ranked artist on Spotify has seen their royalties increase almost 4x – from $34K to $131K.” And, in what might be termed a historical diss, Spotify notes that during the peaking CD era, Tower Records carried only 50,000 CD from thousands of artists. And today, Spotify represents over 100,000 artists generating thousands in royalties from Spotify alone.

Performing artists get the up-front attention in this Music Economics Report, but songwriters and composers should be in the review, and are. We learn that nearly $4.5 billion has been paid out to publishing rights holders over the past two years. Although Spotify repeats tha metric later, it is under the headline “Another Record Year for Songwriters.” But we are not given a single-year number. We are told, in small print: “Songwriters – through their publishers, PROs, and collecting societies – are generating record-breaking revenues driven by streaming services.”

In an interesting double metric, Spotify boasts that nearly 1,500 artists earned over a million dollars in royalties, and over 80% didn’t have a song placed on the Spotify GlobalDaily Top 50 chart — the point being that glamour chart placement isn’t required to make money.