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Spotify says it paid more than $1 billion in royalties last year to the music industry. This is because they are trying to counter criticism from recording artists that they were unable to share prize money in the streaming era.
Royalty payments accounted for more than 60% of the total revenues of Swedish streaming services in 2024. The report said that the $1 billion payment was “the largest in music industry history” compared to Tower Records at its peak in the CD era in the early 2000s. It reported 1.1 billion euros in net profit for the year.
“What we see from our empirical perspective is creating more artists than any other point in music history,” said Sam Duboff, head of marketing and policy for the music business at Spotify, in an interview.
Almost 1,500 artists won at least $1 million royalty from Spotify in 2024, the company said. About 80% of that group did not have Reach Reach on Song Spotify’s “Top 50” charts in the year.
Spotify changed the music industry with the advent of streaming over a decade ago. But it has long drawn rage from musicians. Musicians say streaming models that generate pennies for every listen don’t pay enough artists to make a living.
Backlash has been cooled for years as Spotify has grown to 675 million users worldwide and 263 million people pay to use the app. The royalties have similarly swelled from $1 billion in 2014 to $1 billion in 2024. But the prolonged hostility remains. “Spotify is probably the worst thing that’s happened to a musician,” Bjork said in January.
“For the majority of artists, it doesn’t matter what economics is. There’s so much music being heard, and everything’s really divided into small bits,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Midia Research.
Spotify pays most of the revenue it receives from subscribers to music right-wingers, including record labels, publishers and other groups.
