Spotify has dropped an interactive graphic website which presents statistics promoting Spotify’s value (and the value of streaming music generally) to musicians at many levels. Go HERE for the presentation.
“Who is generating money? How much are they making? What’s considered a lot of streams? How do artists get paid? Let’s get into it.” –Spotify Loud&Clear
Up top, Spotify notes that it has paid over $30-billion in royalties to the music industry as a whole, including $7-billion last year. Following that is an interactive card deck, called Top 10 Takeaways,” which highlights selected payout metrics.
Throughout this exhibition, Spotify takes care to scale the numbers down to a scale that non-A-list musicians can relate to, or aspire to. So, while 1,000 musicians earned over one-million dollars last year, a more relatable metric is that over 50,000 musicians received over $10,000. In all this, it’s important to remember that while Spotify is a global leader in stream volume, most musicians distribute to all the streaming services — so total income would be some multiple of the dollar figures Spotify is promoting.
The pitch is to labels too: “Major record labels earned over $4 billion in profit in 2021, driven by streaming.”
One very interesting card: “The industry at the height of the CD era favored the top 50 artists twice as much as today.” That tidbit is vulnerable to all sorts of questions and qualifications, but Spotify’s thrust is clearly aimed at musicians who assert that the CD era was more financially favorable across the board.
Loud&Clear also flips the equation from artist=money, to money=artist in another interactive playground (pictured below non-interactively):
Clicking on the $1M+ bubble brings up this fact page:
There is much more to this fascinating interactive playground for Spotify’s streaming metrics. , including a “How the Money Flows” video; a tolls which translates listener counts for artists to number of streams; a review of how music publishing works. GO HERE to spend some time with this thing.