By this point, music streaming—also known as accessing a massive digital music library somewhere in the cloud—is second nature. Several companies offer the service—Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, and Deezer may come to mind. But towering over them all, at least for now, is the pioneer Spotify. Here are 10 Spotify stats that explain the music industry of the 2020s, which needless to say is slightly different from the one of the 1990s.
To help out, I used this excellent article from The Hustle. Keep in mind, of course, that some of the numbers are moving targets.
2006
The year Spotify was founded by two Swedish entrepreneurs. The company remains headquartered in Stockholm, though it is incorporated in Luxembourg.
18%
The combined ownership stake that huge record labels such as Sony, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group received in Spotify, much of which has been sold since the company went public in 2018.
100 million
An estimate of the number of songs available to be streamed. (Also in the mix are something like five million podcasts and a bunch of audiobooks.)
320kbps
The maximum streaming quality provided by Spotify. If this means nothing to you, join the club. The point to remember is that Spotify, at least for the time being, streams lossy files (digital files with some information removed), a point of contention for audiophiles and a marketing advantage for competitors offering lossless content.
489 million
The number of monthly active Spotify users, of which 205 million are paying subscribers. With regards to the latter number, that’s somewhere around 30% of global paid subscribers to music streaming services. The sheer volume of listeners partially compensates for a low per-stream payment (see below).
$12.356 billion
Spotify’s annual revenue for the 2022 calendar year. Sources of income include paid memberships and the advertisements used to support free memberships. As of this writing, the company has yet to achieve sustained profitability.
67%
The proportion of revenue that goes to music rights holders, explaining part of the difficulty in turning a profit. About 50% of the revenue goes to those with recording rights (record labels and artists), and 15-20% goes to those with publishing rights (music publishers and songwriters).
$0.00348
A guess as to Spotify’s average per-stream payment to those with recording rights, meaning 1000 streams equates to $3.48. Payments can vary based on a rights holder’s exact deal with Spotify and where the streams come from, and they’re actually calculated based on the number of streams of a specific selection relative to the overall number of streams in a given time period. Once in the hands of rights holders, Spotify obviously has zero say in how that money is divided among labels, artists, etc.
30 seconds
The minimum amount of time a song must be streamed in order to count.
11 million
The number of creators with content on Spotify at the close of 2021. Around 2% make over $1000 per year.
In other words, as a consumer, Spotify stats are interesting. And as a creator, they’re potentially depressing.
2 Responses
Thanks for the numbers. Cleared up a lot of confusion to how this worked.
Glad they were useful!