Spotify can pay $10bn to song business as debate over royalties continues

Spotify paid the song business $10bn (£7.7bn) in 2024, which the streaming carrier mentioned used to be the best possible annual fee from any unmarried store in historical past.

However the figures come as a heated debate continues about what quantity of money artists and songwriters obtain in royalties.

Previous this yr, a number of Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted an awards tournament hosted by means of Spotify in a row about their streaming income.

As the brand new figures had been revealed, a spokesperson for Spotify mentioned the duty for distributing the cash it can pay lay with document labels and publishers.

The corporate mentioned it can pay royalties to rights holders, including that it does no longer have “visibility” on the place the cash in the long run is going as a result of income are in line with artists’ person contracts with their labels.

A spokesperson mentioned: “Spotify does no longer pay artists or songwriters immediately. We pay rights-holders, those are in most cases document labels, song publishers, assortment societies.

“Those rights-holders then pay artists and songwriters in line with their person agreements.”

The amount of cash earned by means of artists will range, however a committee of MPs heard in 2021 that the performer in the long run earns about 16% of a circulate’s general worth.

That might imply an artist whose song generated £100,000 on Spotify would possibly best obtain £16,000 in royalty bills, ahead of tax.

Alternatively, Spotify isn’t the one streaming carrier to generate income for artists, and lots of pop stars make more cash from different source of revenue streams comparable to reside excursions.

Spotify mentioned greater than two-thirds of all song income is going “instantly to the recording and publishing rights-holders”, and added that, like different streamers, Spotify does no longer pay on a per-stream foundation.

The once a year figures had been revealed in Spotify’s Loud and Transparent record – a part of the corporate’s goal to offer transparency on the way it can pay the song business.

The quantity Spotify paid this yr used to be an building up at the greater than $9bn (£7bn) it passed over in 2023.

The record highlighted that the collection of artists producing annual royalties between $1,000 (£770) and $10m had tripled since 2017.

Taylor Swift used to be named Spotify’s best artist globally with greater than 26 billion streams, within the yr she launched her double-length album The Tortured Poets Division: The Anthology.

Swift herself used to be a part of the controversy about streaming royalties in 2014, when she got rid of her song from Spotify as a part of a boycott, in the end re-joining the platform in 2017.

Newer artist boycotts have most often been induced by means of different elements, comparable to Neil Younger and Joni Mitchell casting off their song over the streamer’s employment of podcast host Joe Rogan. Each artists returned to the platform remaining yr.

However dissatisfaction over streaming royalties continues.

A big-scale survey of musicians in Europe performed remaining yr discovered that about 70% had been unsatisfied with the quantity they had been paid in streaming income.