Spotify paid the music industry $10 billion in 2024, which the streaming service said was the highest annual payment from any retailer in history. However, 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’ contracts with their labels.
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 increased by over $ 9 billion, which it handed over in 2023. The report highlighted that the number of artists generating annual royalties between $1,000 and $ 10 million has 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.
