Spotify says its payouts are getting better, but artists still disagree

Spotify on Tuesday released its annual Loud & Clear report, detailing information about the music streaming service’s royalty payments. While Spotify revealed earlier this year that it paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, the new report offers more in-depth numbers about its payments in an effort to dispel reports that the company doesn’t reward artists properly for their work.

For the first time ever, an artist who received one in every million streams on Spotify generated over $10,000 on average in 2024, which is 10x what the same streamshare would have generated a decade ago, the report says.

While Spotify is touting the amount it has paid out to artists and songwriters, many are demanding fair compensation from the streaming service. A few weeks ago, a number of Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted Spotify’s songwriter of the year Grammy party because of the music streaming service’s decreasing royalties. Due to a change introduced by Spotify last year, Billboard has estimated that writers stand to lose about $150 million over 12 months.

In addition, a new report from Duetti (that Spotify has dismissed in a previous statement to TechCrunch) found that Apple Music still pays artists twice as much as Spotify. It found that Spotify paid artists $3.0 per 1,000 streams, while other platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube paid $8.8, $6.2, and $4.8, respectively, per 1,000 streams in 2024.

Following the release of the report, Spotify told TechCrunch that “These claims are ridiculous and unfounded,” and that “no streaming service pays per stream.”

Spotify’s new report attempts to dismiss these reports and concerns. The report details the company’s payout model to explain how artists and publishers earn revenue on its platform.

“Major streaming services all calculate payouts the same way: based on streamshare (if an artist’s catalog accounts for 1% of total streams, it would earn 1% of total royalties),” the company explained in its report. “Still, misconceptions about ‘per-stream rates’ remain widespread. Streaming services don’t pay out based on a fixed per-stream rate — just like listeners don’t pay per song they listen to.”

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers’ (UMAW) has been calling for Spotify to fairly compensate artists, especially independent and smaller artists who are struggling to make a living. Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Congressman Jamaal Bowman last year introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act in partnership with UMAW, detailing a proposal that aims to increase streaming royalties for musicians to one cent per stream.

“It’s easy to calculate what Spotify pays directly to recording artists: $0,” a spokesperson for UMAW said in a statement to TechCrunch.

“There is no direct payment to recording artists by Spotify, because the company claims its manner of streaming falls under no existing regulation or requirement for direct payments to musicians — unlike other digital platforms like satellite radio, internet broadcast, or ‘non-interactive’ streaming, all of which pay recording artists directly. This needs to change, obviously. UMAW supports the Living Wage for Musicians Act to close this loophole and make streaming pay the musicians who create the content for Spotify and other platforms,” the statement concluded.

Spotify’s report touts that its payments are getting better, despite concerns from the industry.

The report reveals that the number of artists generating royalties has tripled since 2017. A decade ago, the top artist on Spotify earned just over $5 million, while today, more than 200 artists have surpassed that milestone.

Over the past decade, the 10,000th-ranked artist on Spotify has seen their royalties increase almost 4x – from $34,000 to $131,000, while the 100,000th-ranked artist has seen their generated royalties multiply by over 10x – increasing from under $600 in 2014 to almost $6,000 in 2024.

In addition, the company revealed that nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify alone last year. Spotify notes that 80% of these artists didn’t have a song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart in 2024, which means that many of them aren’t household names.

Spotify also shared that the artists who generated at least $100,000 in royalties were recording music in over 50 languages in 2024, while the artists who generated at least $1 million on Spotify recorded music in 17 different languages.