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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.