#spotify update

A comparison of streaming platforms

Music plays an incredible part in shaping our society. From protest songs, educational rhymes, folk, classical, rock, techno, indie and disco music, it shapes our world view in a unique and powerful way. The way of listening to music has changed dramatically over the last one hundred and fifty years, from live bands on corners, to the invention of the radio, record players, CD’s, tapes, electronic music and now live streaming.

However, in a world where everything is about profit and popularity, the competition between streaming services is stiff. The pay ranges from awful to poor and as the algorithm evolves to recommend new artists to you, who is really making the most money?

The obvious answer is the streaming platform itself. Spotify wracked in a $18.68 billion (AUD) revenue in 2022 alone. Although Spotify don’t post their net profit, they did report a $391.2 (AUD) million loss in 2022, assuming this loss came from their initial revenue, Spotify should, theoretically, have made a staggering $18.28 billion dollar profit.

This leads us to the artists themselves, with such a large amount of profit and roughly 11 million artists on Spotify, we can only assume that split evenly and leaving a $2 billion (AUD)  dollar profit for Spotify themselves that each artist would be paid an average of $1480 AUD per year.

This is not the case. Spotify pays around $0.003 - $0.005 USD per stream, a pitiful amount. In fact, per 100,000 streams on Spotify an artist can only hope to gain around $300 - $500 USD. On top of this already insanely low number, Spotify practices a 70/30 model with an average of 70% of profit going to the artists themselves, while they take an additional 30%. This leaves us with around $210 - $350 USD profit.  The remaining royalties are then divided between the songwriters, publishers, and owners of the master recording. This could include the artist themselves, but it could also be the label they're signed to, leaving an even smaller profit for the artists themselves.

One of the most popular artists in the world, Taylor Swift, makes around $0.0043 USD per stream on her music. The highest paid artist, Drake, makes around $0.0049 USD per stream on his music. To be considered for having a ‘good number of streams’, an artist needs around 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners, however only 213,000 artists have hit this threshold out of the initial 11 million we discussed earlier.

My Spotify wrapped in a couple of gifs

like, why on EARTH would you ever think it's a good idea to lock lyrics behind a paywall? i can't be the only person who thinks this is ableist to some degree?

there are people who need to access the lyrics for various reasons, including disabilities, but now they can't unless they fork over money??? that's actually ridiculous. spotify just made a huge accessibility issue in an attempt to get a couple extra dollars out of people who NEED THAT FEATURE. a feature that's been FREE for YEARS.

also, what's the point in locking lyrics behind a paywall when they aren't even available anyway? i thought that my spotify app not displaying ANY lyrics on any of the songs i listen to - even for songs that i KNOW had lyrics before - was just some weird glitch that they were trying to fix, but i guess not??? i guess clicking on the microphone to see some silly message saying "you got us!!!! we're still working on finding these lyrics!!!" counts towards the monthly lyric limit, too.