Loud & Clear 2025 update – Spotify’s annual music streaming economics report
Spotify Loud & Clear, the music streaming company’s site designed to demystify royalties, has been updated with the latest statistics.
Since its introduction in 2021, Spotify has updated Loud & Clear every year with their royalty payment data to increase transparency around how money flows from listeners to the artists, via rightsholder, labels and distributors (that’s us!).
This year’s Loud & Clear update includes full year data from 2024 around payouts, the number of artists, stream numbers, publishing revenue, countries and languages, indie artists, streamshare, and more. Below are the ten highlights from this year’s Loud & Clear update.
As always, Spotify reinforces the fact that they don’t pay artists on a pay-per-stream basis, the same as all other major streaming services. Rather they operate on a pro-rata model, where the money from user subscriptions and advertising revenue around the world is pooled, and after Spotify’s 30% cut, is split out to artists and rightsholder based on the percentage of streams achieved by each artist.
It’s important to remember with Loud & Clear that Spotify is just one music streaming service. Music streaming services are just one source of recorded music revenue and recorded music revenue doesn’t include other income sources, such as concert tickets and merch.
It should also be pointed out that while the figures below highlight how artists can earn millions of dollars in revenue on Spotify, the harsh reality is that frequently this money isn’t seen by the artist. Major record labels often take huge percentages of the revenue earned by artists.
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The full break down of the global streaming economy can be found at loudandclear.byspotify.com.
You can find last year’s Spotify Loud & Clear update here.
2024 payout
Announced earlier this year, 2024 was a record-breaking year for Spotify, with payout to the music industry in excess of $10 billion. This figure brings Spotify’s total payout figure to $60 billion since launching in 2006, the highest-paying single retailer in the industry.
Payout increase
In 2014, global recorded music revenue fell to a low of $13 billion across the industry, with Spotify contributing $1 billion. Today the industry is thriving at $45.5 billion, with Spotify’s contribution increasing 10x in ten years.
Increase in artists
There are more artists than ever on Spotify. This has seen more artists generating revenue at every level of the spectrum. In 2017 for example, there were 23.4k artists earning +$10k, 4.3k at +$100k, and 460 at +$1m. In 2024, these three numbers increased to 71.2k, 12.5k and 1.4k.
Artists earning over $6k
There are around a whopping 100,000 artists earning $6k or more in Spotify royalties.
Music publishing
A new milestone and increasing payments to publishing rights holders. The process of obtaining your publishing revenue from collection societies can be difficult for independent artists. RouteNote Publishing simplifies this process.
Successful unknown artists
Despite nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties, the majority of these successful artists didn’t have a song reach the Spotify global daily top 50 chart.
Global audience
The majority of fans are from outside the artist’s home country, showing the immense power of music streaming services, with the ability to help you find a new global audience.
High-earning languages
In 2017, the only individual languages to surpass earnings of over $100 million were English and Spanish. In 2024, there were eight individual languages to reach this milestone. While this graphic doesn’t explicitly list these languages, based on the text we can assume they’re English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, French, and German.
Independent artists
Independent artists accounted for around 50%, or over $5 billion, of Spotify’s royalty payouts in 2024. These artists are delivered to music streaming platforms like Spotify through independent labels and music distributors, such as RouteNote.
Streamshare
In 2014, a one millionth of the total streamshare on Spotify was worth $1,000. Today, this figure has increased by ten times, to $10,000.
