Spotify shares 2023 streaming economics insights

Spotify says the report seeks to increase transparency by sharing new data on the company’s royalty payments and breaking down the global streaming economy, its players and the process.

In terms of earnings, the report shows that 66 000 artists generated more than $10 000 of Spotify payouts in 2023, up from 57 000 in the previous year. Compared to 2017, the first time Spotify started collecting this data, the number has tripled from 23 400 artists.

The data also indicate that there has been growth in the number of artists generating more than $100 000 of annual Spotify payouts: 4 300 (2017), 10 100 (2022) and 11 600 (2023). The trajectory of artists who made more than $1m appears as follows: 460 (2017), 1 060 (2022) and 1 250 (2023).

Similarly, the number of artists in the superstar tier generating more than $10m of annual Spotify payouts have grown from 10 in 2017 to 40 in 2022 and 60 in 2023.

“These figures represent revenue generated from Spotify alone,” the company said. “When taking into account earnings from other services and recorded revenue streams, these artists likely generated four times this revenue from recorded music sources overall, plus additional revenue from concert tickets and merch.”

Further analysis shows that of the artists in the $1m tier, only 20% had a track in the top 50 of its Daily Global Songs chart. A majority of $1m tier artists started their careers in 2010 or later, with Spotify saying that to earn this level of payout, an artist needs “around 4-5 million monthly listeners or 20-25 million monthly streams.”

Another key finding from the report is that more than half of the 66 000 artists who generated more than $10k in 2023 were from countries where English is not the first language. The report shows that Spanish, German, Portuguese, French and Korean are the biggest non-English languages in terms of payouts, pointing to the popularity of reggaeton and other regional genres like Latin, Afrobeats and K-pop. Hindi, Indonesian, Punjabi and Tamil also registered a big increase in 2023, reflecting the service’s growth in India and Southeast Asia.

Additionally, more than 10 million users have uploaded at least one track to Spotify. However, the company says it wants to focus on 225 000 “emerging and professional artists trying to build careers.” The company says about 8 million uploaders have fewer than 10 tracks available on Spotify and that some 5 million of them have fewer than 100 total streams across their catalogue.

Spotify added that the 50 000th most popular artist on the platform generated $16 500 in payouts last year – nearly six times more than the 50 000th artist in 2017. Over 329 000 songs were streamed more than 1 million times in 2023 – up from about 281 000 in 2022.

As for rightsholders, Spotify said it paid out $4bn to publishers over the last two years. “Songwriters – through their publishing rightsholders – are generating record-breaking revenues, driven by streaming services. Over the last two years, Spotify has paid out nearly $4bn to publishers, performance rights organisations, and collecting societies that represent songwriters.

“Publishers, songwriters and their CMOs are seeing more than two times the revenue ($5.5bn in 2022) in the streaming era than they ever had in the CD/sales era ($2.5bn in 2001), per the Global Value of Music Copyright,” it said.