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Spotify says it paid more than $10bn in royalties to the music industry last year, as it seeks to counter criticism from recording artists that it has failed to share the bounty of the streaming era.
The royalty payments represented more than 60 per cent of the Swedish streaming service’s €15.7bn in total revenue for 2024. In a report, Spotify said the $10bn payout was “the largest in music industry history”, comparing itself to Tower Records at the peak of the CD era in the early 2000s. It reported €1.1bn in net income for the year.
“What we’re seeing empirically is way more artists making it than at any other time in music history”, said Sam Duboff, head of marketing and policy for Spotify’s music business, in an interview.
Nearly 1,500 artists earned at least $1mn in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said. Some 80 per cent of that group did not have a song reach Spotify’s “Top 50” chart during the year.
Spotify transformed the music industry with the advent of streaming over a decade ago. But it has long drawn ire from musicians who say that the streaming model, which generates just pennies per listen, does not pay artists enough to make a living.
The backlash has cooled over the years as Spotify has grown to 675mn users globally, with 263mn of them paying to use the app. Royalties have similarly ballooned, from $1bn in 2014 to $10bn in 2024. But lingering hostility remains. Bjork in January said “Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians”.
“For the majority of artists, it doesn’t matter what the economics are, there is just so much music being listened to, it all gets divided into really small bits”, said Mark Mulligan, analyst at Midia Research.
Spotify pays most of the revenue it receives from subscribers out to music rightsholders, including record labels, publishers and other groups, who own the copyrights to its song catalogue.
