The Spotify music app is seen on a phone in New York City on June 4, 2024.
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Spotify is minting music millionaires.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated more than $1 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said Wednesday in its annual Loud and Clear Report.
Spotify said more than 80% of the artists in that pool did not have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 chart. To reach that million-dollar threshold, an artist would need to have around four to five million monthly listeners, or 20 million to 25 million monthly streams.
“Spotify has helped level the playing field for artists at every stage of their careers,” the company said in the report. “Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a decade-spanning catalog nor a chart-topping hit.”
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The news comes about a month after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings beat that saw the Swedish music streamer record its first full year of profitability.
Spotify said the upper echelon of royalties, artists who generate more than $10 million, has soared 600% since 2017, reaching a total of 70 for 2024.
The company said it paid an all-time high of $10 billion in royalties to the music industry for 2024, a figure it claimed is “more than any single retailer has ever paid in a year, and over 10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era.”
Spotify does not pay per stream. Instead, it calculates a rights holder’s “streamshare,” or the percentage of streams they get out of a particular market.
