Published
Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 17:45
- The platform has updated its data-driven website, Loud & Clear, with numerous financial stats.
Spotify has updated its data-driven website, Loud & Clear, with financial stats from 2021.
Loud & Clear was launched in 2021 to "increase transparency by sharing new data on Spotify's royalty payments and breaking down the global streaming economy," according to the platform. Here are six key takeaways from last year:
• Spotify paid out $7 billion, which is more than any other streaming platform. This is also "the largest sum paid by one retailer to the music industry in one year in history," according to Spotify.
• $4 billion went to the three major labels: Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group
• For the first time, more than 1,000 artists generated more than $1 million of revenue from Spotify alone. However, as the latest MusicREDEF newsletter pointed out, this figure represents not how much the artists made but how much went to their ecosystems of label, publisher, distributor etc.
• 52,600 artists generated more than $10,000 of revenue, with 34 percent of these based outside of Australia, Canada, China, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UK and the US.
• 28 percent of artists who generated $10,000-plus uploaded their music themselves via platforms like DistroKid, TuneCore and CD Baby.
• More than 238,000 songs were streamed over a million times in 2021
Elsewhere in the FAQs section, Spotify responds to criticism around its royalty rates, which have come under repeated scrutiny for being too low.
"In the streaming era, fans don't pay per song and no major streaming services pay per stream, so we don't believe that a 'per-stream rate' is a meaningful number to analyse," Spotify said. "There are a number of factors that contribute to that ratio looking small, which we understand can seem problematic. We don't believe it is; we are confident our model is maximising revenue for everyone."
According to Spotify, there are three factors—popularity, global reach and its free, ad-supported service—that decrease its per-stream rate. Read the full answer. For more Loud & Clear stats, Music Business Worldwide has crunched the numbers in this week's edition of its Stat Of The Week series.
Read our recent story about why artists find it hard to leave Spotify.
Photo: Thibault Penin