Our new 2024 royalty policies aim to direct an additional $1 billion to emerging and professional artists over a five-year period.
One of the new policies requires that tracks have at least 1,000 streams in the past year in order to generate recording royalties on Spotify. Spotify makes no additional money under this model, and the policy has no impact on the total size of the music royalty pool paid out by Spotify.
And 99.5% of all streams are of tracks that have at least 1,000 annual streams, and each of those tracks will earn more under this policy.
This policy targets the population of tens of millions of tracks on Spotify that generate only $0.02 per month on average. In the aggregate, these tracks with under 1,000 annual streams represent ~0.5% of total streams (and therefore 0.5% of the total royalty pool). Now that Spotify’s royalty pool has become so large — $10B+ in 2024 alone — 0.5% is a material amount.
Our policy helps ensure that as much money as possible reaches the emerging and professional artists that our platform is built to support. Because labels and distributors require a minimum amount to withdraw (usually $2-$50 per withdrawal), and banks charge a fee for the transaction (usually $1-$20 per withdrawal), these small monthly payments often don’t reach the uploaders.
We believe it’s more impactful for these tens of millions of dollars per year to increase payments to those most dependent on streaming revenue, rather than being spread out in tiny payments that typically don’t even reach an artist.