Is the $10bn Spotify gave artists last year enough to silence its critics?

Swedish music streaming platform Spotify paid the music industry over $10 billion (€9.2 billion) over 2024.

Loud & Clear, Spotify’s annual report on how much the platform gives back to the industry has been released. 2024’s figures bring the total amount Spotify has paid back into the industry nearly $60 billion (€55 billion).

It makes Spotify the single biggest retailer contributing to the music industry in history, with its annual figures 10 times greater than the largest record store at the height of the CD era.

It’s also a significant figure in comparison to the company’s profits. Spotify paid out over 60% of the €15.7 billion it made in total revenue in 2024.

While Spotify’s contribution back to musicians, labels, promoters and others in the industry is significantly higher than any single record store ever has been, they exist in an entirely different model.

Music streaming makes up around 89% of the revenue of the entire industry. Spotify leads the pack of the streamers, with 31.7% of the market share. It’s a dominance over the space that far exceeds any single retailer during previous eras of music.

That rise in streaming culture is represented in the Loud & Clear report. In the decade since 2014, global revenues have recovered from a low point of $13 billion to $28 billion (€11.9-25.7 billion). At the same time, Spotify’s annual payouts have increased tenfold from $1 billion (€0.9 billion).

Spotify uses the report to respond to one of its main sources of criticism: that it underpays artists. What critics miss is the enlarged number of artists attempting careers in music, Spotify argues.

“Looking back to the peak of the CD era, only a few thousand artists had their music on the shelves of record stores,” the report reads. “Streaming has allowed millions to easily share their music globally – that’s an amazing thing. But the sheer volume of uploaders means the fraction who find success appears smaller over time.”

The 100,000th-ranked artist based on royalties earn around 10 times what they earned a decade ago, from under $600 to $6,000 (€550-5,500). At the next echelon up, the 10,000th-ranked artist, increased in earnings by around four times, from $34,000 to $131,000 (€31,200-120,000).

It means that an artist who received in every million streams on Spotify generated over $10,000 (€9,200) on average. This year, they also included a tool within the report to work out where an artist is likely to fall within the platform’s rankings, to be able to guess how much they might earn.

Hurray For The Riff Raff, who released Euronews Culture’s Best Album of 2024, are in the top 24,000 artists on Spotify through their 508,400 monthly listeners. This means the New Orleans band will earn somewhere between the $6,000 for the 100,000th-ranked and $131,000 for the 10,000th-ranked artist.

Comparatively, second favourite album artist Charli XCX is in the top 1,000 streamed artists with her 32 million monthly listeners. Spotify has said that the nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties last year.

Spotify also sought to explain some of the misconceptions around earnings. “Streaming services don’t pay out based on a fixed per-stream rate” they write, explaining that instead it is calculated based on an artist’s streamshare – the proportion they are being streamed in comparison to streams across the entire platform.

Last year, in response to the release of the previous Loud & Clear report, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek offered many of these arguments in response to the platform’s critics. Ek also made note that while Spotify is consistent in how it pays artists, it cannot account for what share artists get of that money after labels and publishers touch it.

“Spotify is probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians,” Icelandic musician Björk said earlier this year. She lamented how younger artists must rely on streaming to grow their fanbases, counting herself lucky to be established and able to tour – where the money really is.

Even with Spotify’s grand payout figures, it’s still estimated that artists earn somewhere between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. It pales in comparison to the amount artists would earn from physical media sales. While vinyl sales continue to increase though, Pandora's box of streaming music is unlikely ever to close. How useful comparisons between streaming and physical media sales are anymore is questionable.

Spotify has also come under new criticism in the past year. Investigative journalists have found that large swathes of the easy-listening playlists increasingly popular as background music are from seemingly non-existent artists. As Spotify’s profits increase, questions have been raised as to whether a significant portion of the payouts are able to be rerouted internally through company-commissioned music.

“What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform,” Liz Pelly wrote in an expose piece.

“In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.” Pelly’s investigation is fully explicated in her 2025 book "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist".

Spotify is unlikely to slough off its critics any time soon, but the Loud & Clear report proves once again how enmeshed the platform is within the music industry.