The Process

How the Money Flows

One of the questions we get asked most often is: How do artists and songwriters get paid?

We break it down in the videos below:

Streaming Numbers in Context

Spotify, like the other major streaming services, pays royalties to rights holders based on an artist’s share of overall streams across the platform. This is referred to as “streamshare.” So it’s important to know how streaming numbers stack up on Spotify in 2023 to understand payouts.

What might have been a lot of streams even five years ago looks pretty different today. In fact, over 329,000 songs were streamed over a million times in 2023 alone.

Enter any monthly listener count for an artist or all-time stream count for a song to estimate how each number compares with all artists and songs on Spotify.

*Note that all numbers are rounded to the thousandth place.

0

monthly listeners would be in the top artists on Spotify globally

This artist is within the top 1,000 monthly listeners on Spotify

(based on 2023 data).

0

all time streams would be in the top tracks on Spotify globally

This track is in the top 1,000 streams on Spotify

(based on 2023 data).

Your Questions, Answered

We know you have a ton of questions around music streaming economics and we want to make sure to get you the answers. We’ve included the questions we get most frequently from artists and will continue to add to this list as more questions come in.