Spotify’s 2021 royalty report paints a rose-tinted vision of the music streaming industry

Musicians who are unhappy with their streaming rates are being offered some transparency by the company. The company updated its website today, providing a breakdown of some metrics for how artists, publishers, and rights holders make money off of Spotify streams.

Positive improvements over 2020 are what Spotify chooses to call out. The amount of money paid to artists, labels, and other moving pieces of the music industry increased last year. Over 16,500 artists earned at least $50,000 in royalties in 2021, compared to 13,400 in 2020, and over 1,000 artists cracked $1 million for the first time. Last year, over 52,600 artists earned at least $10,000 from streaming on the platform.

Artists and fans can use the calculator to see how their music compares to the rest of the platform.

The Loud and Clear website doesn't portray the royalty rates as anything other than a net positive for the industry, something that musicians can attest to. When it comes to highlighting the number of artists who are succeeding on the platform, the company is notably quiet when it comes to putting those big wins in the context of the far larger number of artists who aren't pulling in.

The overall growth is encouraging, but the relative numbers for success are shifting. It doesn't matter how popular an artist's catalog is, it doesn't matter how well a song or artist does compared to the rest of the platform. It would have been a rarified achievement back in the service's earlier days if over 230,000 songs had broken 1 million streams in the year 2021.

As the music industry continues to hold streaming platforms to increasing scrutiny over how they pay artists, increased transparency is a good thing. There is still a lot of work to be done to translate streaming music success into monetary success for artists on the platform.