Spotify Pays Record $9 Billion to Music Industry in 2023
Spotify paid out their highest ever payments to artists around the world last year as streaming continues to grow.
Spotify are the world’s leading, dedicated music streaming service. Their contribution to the global music economy is huge and it’s only getting bigger. The company announced this week that they have paid $48 billion to rightsholders since the company started.
That figure comes after revealing an astonishing $9 billion in payouts in 2023. Music economist Will Page put the global value of music copyright at $41.5 billion in 2022. So, with a rough estimate of a 10% increase on that, it means that Spotify alone counted for around 20% of the contribution to global music revenues to labels, publishers, and artists last year.
In fact, Spotify surpassed even YouTube whose video site and dedicated music service both make up a large percentage of global consumption. YouTube announced on the February 1st that they paid out $6 billion to rightsholders in 2023.
Whilst Spotify saw huge growth in music payments last year, it actually became a smaller part of their business. Only fractionally, but Spotify’s continued investment in podcasts and fresh push on audiobooks saw non-musical audio take a larger percentage of Spotify’s revenue. The $9 billion in music payouts is roughly 63% of Spotify’s total revenues, which in previous years has been closer to 70%.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in Spotify’s earnings call this week: “I feel really really good about where we are with our music partners. I feel great about the value we’re bringing to the music industry . And I think that’s being widely recognised…. It’s probably at the best it’s been.”
Spotify are redirecting revenues to increase artist payments
Spotify have been taking a hard stance on fraud streaming which will only increase in 2024. Their newly introduced royalty policies will see fraud streaming punished harder and revenues from non-musical noise audio redirected back to musical artists. Spotify reported that they detected “signs of artificial streaming” on 1.14% of total streams. Taking that percentage from their payouts, that means they managed to redirect $102.6 million from fraudsters back into artists’ and labels’ pockets.
2023 saw a bigger year in music than ever before. A report from Luminate revealed that over 7 trillion songs were streamed last year alone. That’s an incredible growth of 33.7% in music streaming listens, showing no sign of stopping.