Our Annual Music Economics Report

Every year, Spotify has paid out more and more money in streaming royalties, resulting in record revenues and growth for rights holders on behalf of artists and songwriters. These rights holders include record labels, publishers, independent distributors, performance rights organizations, and collecting societies.

The fact that streaming lowered barriers to entry is old news. But the impact on artists’ livelihoods, and the global diversity of that impact, is becoming more clear. Of the 66,000 artists who generated at least $10,000 on Spotify alone – and likely $40,000 across all recorded revenue sources – more than half are from countries where English is not the first language.

Artists who—in the past—might have struggled to break through are now finding their audiences, and the music industry today is a more diverse and accurate reflection of the world we live in. 

Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, and Korean lead the pack for performance in languages other than English – while Hindi, Indonesian, Punjabi, Tamil, and Greek all saw huge upticks in 2023.

For the first time ever, the catalogs of DIY artists and artists signed to independent record labels represented about half of all revenues generated on Spotify in 2023.

Totaling nearly $4.5B, this represents a 4x increase since 2017. 

This is the highest amount Indies have ever generated from a single retailer in one year.

In the streaming era, the charts aren’t big enough to contain all of the artists finding success. Fans’ tastes are more diverse, and the royalty pool is increasingly massive ($9B+!) – which means more revenue to a wider range of artists. You’d be surprised to see the artists who generated a million dollars on Spotify last year. Many aren’t household names and didn’t need a “hit” song to have a big year.

Of the 1,250+ artists who generated $1M+ from Spotify alone – and likely over $4M across all recorded revenue sources – over 1,000 of them didn’t have a single song that reached Spotify’s Global Top 50 all year.

This list is not just classic, generation-spanning artists. The majority of the artists generating $1M+ started their careers in 2010 or later.

As a rule of thumb, artists can start approaching $1 million per year with around 4-5 million monthly listeners or 20-25 million monthly streams.

Songwriters — through their publishing rights holders — are generating record-breaking revenues, driven by streaming services. Over the last two years, Spotify has paid out nearly $4 billion to publishers, performance rights organizations, and collecting societies that represent songwriters.

Publishers, songwriters and their CMOs are seeing more than 2x the revenue ($5.5B in 2022) in the streaming era than they ever had in the CD/sales era ($2.5B in 2001), per the Global Value of Music Copyright.

More artists are succeeding and, as a result, even more are interested in becoming artists. Sure, more than 10 million uploaders have at least a single track on Spotify, but when it comes to building financial opportunities, we’re focused on those most dependent on streaming as part of their livelihood: these 225,000 emerging and professional artists that are building careers.

As a point of comparison, FIFA estimated there are hundreds of millions of people who self-identify as “footballers,” but 128,694 people are actually getting paid any amount of money from it. While music and sports are quite different, this demonstrates how widespread the aspiration is to participate in creative and athletic pursuits and make a living from them.

Another way to think about it: The 10+ million uploaders on Spotify are comparable to the tens of millions who have uploaded at least a single video to YouTube, often just to share something they enjoy with the world. The number of creators trying to build a career as a video creator is much smaller.

Careers don’t just start on Spotify, they grow on Spotify. We’re focused on helping emerging and professional artists make a sustained living off their work, year after year. Four out of five artists who generated at least $10,000+ in 2017, generated at least that much this past year. Of the 23,400 artists who generated $10,000 in 2017, nearly half generated more than $50,000 in 2023 and likely $200,000 overall across all recorded revenue sources.

With over 600 million listeners across 184 markets, what might have been a lot of streams even six years ago looks pretty different today. In the early days of streaming, a million streams of a song could take time to reach. But in today’s landscape, over 329,000 songs were streamed over a million times in 2023 alone.

One of the most frequently asked questions is “How do my streams rank in terms of popularity?” As you can see in this table, it’s changing fast. 

With Spotify listeners streaming trillions of times a year, it’s hard to put big numbers in context. If you want to see how your tracks stack up, check out Streaming Numbers in Context.