After numerous artists complained about how little money they were generating from Spotify and similar online streaming music services, the app announced that it paid artists $10 billion in royalties in 2024.
The company said that it brought the total payouts to $60 billion since the app was launched.
Spotify said that about half of the royalties it paid to artists in 2024 were to independent artists.
Spotify said that about 100,000 artists made $6,000 or more last year. Royalties ranged from $1,000 to $10 million per year. About 10,000 artists made a minimum of $131,000 on Spotify.
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Spotify said about 274,000 artists made at least $1,000 through the app in 2024, which is about double the number from 2019.
"As a point of comparison, at the peak of the CD era, Tower Records carried only 50,000 CDs from thousands of artists in total," Spotify said. "Today, however, over 100,000 artists are generating thousands in royalties on Spotify alone."
Spotify's annual report is intended to show that artists are profiting from the app years after some musicians pulled their content from the platform. Among them was Taylor Swift, who wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the app was negatively affecting artists.
"In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace," she wrote.
In the decade since, Swift and Spotify have made amends. Swift recently partnered with Spotify to conduct an immersive experience for her fans in Asia.
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