Spotify has reported that in 2024 it paid $10 billion to the music industry – a new record. It should be noted that this money didn’t all go to artists, various partners such as publishers are also in the mix.
The streaming service says that right now over 10,000 artists make over $100,000 each per year on Spotify. You can see a more detailed breakdown here. Some are making big bucks – 1,250 artists made over $1 million and 60 made over $10 million in a year from just Spotify.
For context on how things have changed, a decade ago in 2014 the statistic was around 10,000 artists making at least $10,000 a year from Spotify alone. To date, Spotify has paid out nearly $60 billion to the music industry.
Spotify pays $3.0 per 1,000 streams, based on data from Duetti (a music financing platform), while YouTube, Apple Music and Amazon Music pay $4.8, $6.2 and $8.8 per 1,000 streams (numbers for 2024).
Spotify cites retention as one of the key reasons for its success – things like curated playlists and the AI DJ feature have listeners coming back. The ad-supported free tier is also important as it helps onboard users – 60% of Premium subscribers started on the ad tier. Launching in multiple markets and setting prices fit for those markets is touted as another reason for success.
Right now, there are over 500 million paid subscribers in total for the various music streaming services. Spotify itself has 252 million subscribers or so. However, the company thinks that reaching 1 billion paid subscribers across all services is doable in the near future.
