How much did Spotify pay your favourite artist in 2024?
image credits: John Phillips/Getty Images
Spotify Unwrapped lets users discover how much Spotify paid their favourite artists.
Spotify Wrapped has become a year-end tradition for music lovers, showcasing their top songs and artists. But have you ever wondered how much your listening contributed to your favourite artist’s income? Well, the Spotify Unwrapped calculator uses your Spotify Wrapped stats to estimate how much Spotify paid your most-streamed artists this year. Please note some users are currently reporting the site as unavailable, as the site may have been taken down following legal threat from Spotify as it sought to highlight the low pay artists receive from the platform.
So, how does it work?
The calculator is straightforward to use. Simply input your subscription plan and Spotify Wrapped stats, such as total minutes streamed. Using this data, the tool calculates how much you paid Spotify through your subscription, coupled with an estimation as to how much Spotify paid your favourite artist based on your listening habits.
Curious about my own stats, I submitted my listening data. With a Premium Individual subscription plan and 7,150 minutes spent listening to Kanye West, Spotify would have paid him just £4.82 despite my subscription generating £143.88 in revenue for the platform. When I calculated my total listening time of 63,771 minutes, Spotify’s payout across all artists would have only been £42.95.
Surprised by the low numbers?
The stark figures reflect Spotify’s complex payout system, with many variables at play making any “pay per stream” figure potentially misleading. Spotify, like many major streaming platforms, operates on a pro-rata model that shares monthly revenue between artists, per their streams for the month. Factors influencing payouts include:
- Whether the listener is a paying subscriber or on the ad-supported free tier.
- The listener’s geographic region.
- Total streams on the platform that month.
- Any agreements Spotify has with record labels.
This model means artists receive a fraction of a subscriber’s payment, shared among all streamed music. Independent artists may receive 90% of Spotify’s estimated payout, while label-signed artists often receive significantly less. This can range between 5% to 50%, depending on their contracts.
Putting it into perspective
Despite its limitations, the Spotify Unwrapped calculator is a fun, albeit estimated, way to gauge your favourite artists’ earnings from your listens. While my individual calculations suggest low payouts per user, the scale of Spotify’s global subscriber base – over 250 million premium users – translates to billions of pounds paid to artists annually. For example, if everyone streamed 63,771 minutes like me, it would mean over £10 billion distributed to artists based on this calculator.
For independent artists, platforms like RouteNote offer a way to take control of earnings. By choosing RouteNote’s premium plan, artists can receive 100% of their streaming revenue, bypassing any cuts taken by labels.