We can be confident that, judging by the extraordinary market leverage of these major record companies, no other label and/or distributor gets paid a higher royalty rate than this 52% standard. This was a figure the parties agreed to during negotiations in 2017, and it’s believed to have remained unchanged since. Spotify pays the major record companies a 52% share of all net receipts attributable to streams of their artists. So if a group of artists is getting 90% of the streams, they’re also getting 90% of the money.
Let’s use it to paint a conservative portrait of how many performers are actually able to “live off their art” - and how many cannot - on Spotify today.Īs covered previously, Spotify pays out its royalties on a pro-rata basis, meaning that, at the end of each accounting period, all of its royalty money gets virtually dumped into one pot, from which artists are paid according to their share of all streams on the platform. That prospectus reads: “Spotify provides a large stage for more than 3 million creators and artists to connect with existing fans and to be discovered by new fans.”Ĭonsidering that around 40,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify daily, and that rival SoundCloud recently confirmed that it hosts music from over 25 million artists and creators, you’d expect that this 3 million figure would have ballooned considerably since Spotify announced it. The latest official statistic I could find for the total number of artists on Spotify arrived in March 2018, within the prospectus the firm sent to would-be investors before its flotation on the New York Stock Exchange. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek issued this mission statement in front of investors in 2018, and the company has continually published it in annual results: It wants “to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art.” Nitpicking over corporate slip-ups is rarely a productive use of time, but in this instance it matters, partly because multiple global media outlets are perpetuating the incorrect 10% number, but also because the true statistic (90%) gets to the heart of Spotify’s own grandiose mission statement - and its shaky relationship with reality.
0 kommentar(er)
