Spotify pays $10bn to music industry as debate over royalties continues

BBC News

12-03-2025

Spotify paid the music industry $10bn (£7.7bn) in 2024, which the streaming service said was the highest annual payment from any single retailer in history. But the figures come as a heated debate continues about how much money artists and songwriters receive in royalties.Earlier this year, several Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted an awards event hosted by Spotify in a row about their streaming earnings.As the new figures were published, a spokesperson for Spotify said the responsibility for distributing the money it pays lay with record labels and publishers.
The company said it pays royalties to rights holders, adding that it does not have "visibility" on where the money ultimately goes because earnings are based on artists' individual contracts with their labels.A spokesperson said: "Spotify does not pay artists or songwriters directly. We pay rights-holders, these are typically record labels, music publishers, collection societies."These rights-holders then pay artists and songwriters based on their individual agreements."The amount of money earned by artists will vary, but a committee of MPs heard in 2021 that the performer's share of royalties is often about 16%.That would mean an artist whose music generated £100,000 on Spotify might only receive £16,000 in royalty payments, before tax.However, Spotify is not the only streaming service to generate revenue for artists, and many pop stars make more money from other income streams such as live tours.
Spotify said more than two-thirds of all music revenue goes "straight to the recording and publishing rights-holders", and added that, like other streamers, Spotify does not pay on a per-stream basis.The annual figures were published in Spotify's Loud and Clear report - part of the company's aim to provide transparency on how it pays the music industry.The amount Spotify paid this year was an increase on the more than $9bn (£7bn) it handed over in 2023.The report highlighted that the number of artists generating annual royalties between $1,000 (£770) and $10m had tripled since 2017. Taylor Swift was named Spotify's top artist globally with more than 26 billion streams, in the year she released her double-length album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
Swift herself was part of the debate about streaming royalties in 2014, when she removed her music from Spotify as part of a boycott, eventually re-joining the platform in 2017.More recent artist boycotts have generally been prompted by other factors, such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removing their music over the streamer's employment of podcast host Joe Rogan. Both artists returned to the platform last year.But dissatisfaction over streaming royalties continues. A large-scale survey of musicians in Europe carried out last year found that about 70% were unhappy with the amount they were paid in streaming revenue.