How Spotify answers "If an artist has millions of streams, why don’t they earn more?"
How Spotify answers "If an artist has millions of streams, why don’t they earn more?"
- If an artist has millions of streams, why don’t they earn more?
Spotify has been around for more than a decade. We now have over 345 million listeners, streaming more songs per month than ever before, which means the activity on the platform increases exponentially. And streaming services pay based on streamshare, not a per-stream rate.
Because of streaming’s growth and the increase in engagement per user, the meaning of a million streams has changed over the years — lots of tracks are reaching a million streams, and more often than you think. In fact, 550,000 songs have now surpassed a million streams, and 207,000 songs received a million streams in 2020 alone. Over a hundred songs have even reached a billion streams. To get a better sense of the Spotify ecosystem, you can play around with the interactive tool on this site, which reflects data as of December 2020.
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How many lawyers did it take for Spotify NOT to answer the question? Spotify has a market cap of 52 BILLION! Yet they are saying because so many people are streaming they can't pay the artists? What are they doing with all of their increased revenue from all of their new users?
The crazy part is that the biggest reason most artists go on Spotify in the first place is because they want to be on the biggest platform because they "think" that because Spotify is the biggest, that is where they will make the most money. But the opposite is true. Because (a) Spotify likes to keep all the money instead of paying it to artists and (b) the more artists Spotify has, it doesn't mean it is getting paying customers at the same rate, the biggest platform pays artists the least.
Oh math...