How many Spotify streams does it take to earn a decent living?
In an old job I worked in, it became somewhat of a Friday treat to rotate the office DJ. It was a chance to share tastes, sing along, and bring in the excited atmosphere of the weekend.
It was a good idea, until one person’s turn came round and I heard something I still haven’t been able to yet shake—an advert, creeping in between the cracks of an AI-generated Spotify playlist.
It was at that point, I knew we had entered the twilight zone. A world where art was considered free and it was normalised to adopt a budget approach to how we engaged with it. Not only was it wildly indicative that the person in question deemed the price of what was ordinarily one record too much for access to an unlimited bank of music; it once again left the artists hanging in the balance.
As their earnings dwindle from the onslaught of artistic digitalisation, we could happily carry on so long as we were willing to live with the interjection of adverts. So, who wins in this instance? For it certainly isn’t us, as not-so-paying listeners, and it can’t be the artists who are robbed of my former colleagues’ £11.99 per month.
Undoubtedly, it’s the streaming services. For 2024, Spotify posted a net income of €1.2billion, while its co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has cashed out nearly $700m in shares in the company since 2023. But when the platform is inevitably challenged with questions about the morality of its structure, it’s quick to rely on referencing its payouts, which in 2024 hit $10bn, in the hopes it will portray some sense of music egalitarianism.
This overlooks how many artists are not even close to that percentage, but, more importantly, it misses a fundamental element of the payout structure—the idea that bigger, more commercial artists will forever get a tastier slice of the pie. Their flat monthly service fee isn’t tailored to listening habits in the slightest; instead, it is bundled into a giant pot which is then redistributed amongst the entirety of artists on their platform. Meaning, my £11.99 a month goes towards Taylor Swift’s monthly earnings, despite my never having listened to her music.
We all know that community is at the very heart of burgeoning artists. But how can they ever rely on their community to help support their endeavours, when their community isn’t wholly responsible for funding their art. It’s a mismatch that makes the reality of streaming’s horrifically bleak royalty payments of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream all the worse.
So, how many streams create a musical living?
In their bid to prove Spotify is indeed a profitable platform to use, they are quick to highlight that there are now over 200 artists each generating over $5m a year from them, an increase from just one a decade ago. But this fundamentally overlooks the fact that 120,000 songs are released daily on the platform, across what is reported to be 11m artists in total on the platform. Making those “millionaires” part of a 0.001818% club.
Obviously, $5m isn’t exactly the metric for making a living. But if you slide down the scale, it doesn’t make for any better viewing. In 2024, Spotify claimed that besides the 11m total published artists, there were 225,000 artists they titled “emerging or professional recording acts”.
So, with that metric and the reports that their 10,000th-ranked artists earned $131,000, it means that just 4.4% of artists are in with a shot of hitting that annual salary, while an even more frightening 0.6% are in with a shot of generating $1m or more.
