We would love to report on the money that artists take home as a result of their Spotify performance — but we do not have insight into each individual artist’s and songwriter’s agreements with their chosen rights holders. We can only report the data that’s available to us, which is the amount of money that has left Spotify.
So the data on this site centers around the royalties generated — for both recording and publishing — that Spotify pays out to music rights holders. We look at each performing artist on Spotify and are reporting how much was paid to their rights holders across their full catalog for each calendar year.
Spotify doesn’t pay artists directly. We pay rights holders selected by the artist — whether that’s a major label, independent label, aggregator, distributor, or otherwise. You can check out more from our “How the Money Flows” video here.