Spotify reported on royalties to musicians – in 2020, the platform paid out $ 5 billion to copyright holders

Music service Spotify has responded to musicians’ attacks about underestimating their creativity on the platform. The company shared information about deductions, service statistics and launched a special website where performers can calculate their work rating.

The platform has paid out more than $ 23 billion in royalties to music copyright holders. Of these, 5 billion last year alone. For comparison, this is $ 1.7 billion more than in 2017.

The service also shared statistics. Currently, 1.2 million performers are registered on the platform, with more than a thousand listeners. About 15% of them (over 184 thousand) received royalties of one thousand dollars. However, it is important to understand that royalties are not necessarily transferred to artists – they are transferred to record companies and other distributors who have signed contracts with the artists. Just 870 artists crossed the million-dollar barrier.

As for popularity, any performer can check it through the special site Loud & Clear. For example, a song with 100,000 plays would only have entered the top 2,710,000 songs on Spotify.

Spotify VP Charlie Hellman also commented on SoundCloud’s move to a pay-per-view model rather than overall artist popularity. He stated that if the industry decides to move in this direction, Spotify will be ready for it.

At the end of February, it became known that Spotify is rapidly gaining popularity in Russia. Despite its relatively recent launch, the platform ranked third among music services, surpassing Apple Music. It was bypassed only by Boom (from VKontakte) and Yandex.Music.