Sam Duboff

@Navjosh thanks for sharing!! we're working quickly to expand access as soon as we can.

Great, much needed update. We deal with fake songs on our artists' pages every other month now, it's frustrating

given it's one of the most requested features i hear from artists, i'm so excited we're launching the beta for artist profile protection today. when turned on, it adds a new step for artists in @spotifyartists, where they review new releases that list them as an artist, actively approving them before they can appear on their profile. that means spammy releases won't show up on your profile or get recommended to your listeners. we're excited to be the first streaming service to address this problem that has plagued the entire industry for years. we're testing it out first with thousands of artists starting today and will roll it out more broadly as soon as we can. it's a particularly complex feature, so i broke it down in this video. or you can read more in our blog: artists.spotify.com/blog/introduci…

@citizencope @RuncieDan appreciate you!

@duboff @RuncieDan I subscribe to the service, contribute, and get direct payments to my “label” through the distributor. Can definitely attest to the payments being made by SPOT. Yes , it’s More than other services. Love to give some more thoughts on it offline .

There are 80 artists whose catalogs generated $10M+ each on Spotify in 2025. Up from 40 in 2022.

ok, appreciate the feedback! you're right that we pay labels/distributors/publishers/etc., never the artist or songwriter directly. we never try to be misleading on that topic. we share context about this in a few places: - you can see it in the bottom left of the image that dan screenshot in this tweet (and we put that same language on each $$ level on the site) - we feature a dedicated FAQ on the topic on the site (pasted below) - we published and promote this separate website to try to explain how the system works to artists & songwriters b/c it's certainly confusing: artists.spotify.com/royalties-guide if you explore loud & clear, would love any other feedback you have on where we can be clearer. our goal is be the most transparent industry player on the topic of artist royalties, and i think we are. we can only publish the data we have though!

@duboff @RuncieDan You can make it transparent by saying what you are paying label entities instead of framing them as artist catalog payments . Thats where it is a bit misleading. The label entities own the Master recordings , even if the artist has ownership.

from spotify's side, how can this data be more transparent than sharing exactly how much we are paying out for the catalog, and then labeling it clearly as how much was generated (across recording and publishing) not earned? some artists are self-releasing and might be getting 100% of what we pay out. many high-earning artists are on labels, and we have no idea what their deals are. we're just publishing our part of the equation transparently. wish other streaming services or industry players would do the same.

@duboff @RuncieDan The artist does not make what is paid out for a catalog its pretty simple . This is actually not transparent. It makes it seem as if artists were paid catalog payments . Not a complaint just a fact .

@citizencope @RuncieDan not sure what you mean by misleading — we label it pretty clearly here! we of course can't know what artists'/songwriters' deal terms are, so we focus on reporting out transparently the data we have access to, which is about the $$ when it leaves our hands.

@RuncieDan Thats the catalog of The artist and publishing . Not the artist btw . Unless they own Master and Publishing , tbis is misleading.

wish i had time to reply to more comments on these topics! important to talk about. every streaming service pays roughly the same way — close to 70% of music revenue goes back to the royalty pool, paid out by streamshare (if you get 1% of streams, you get 1% of that royalty pool). that ~70% is more than gets paid back to creators in most other creative industries and is a higher % than was paid back to the industry in the CD era. no streaming service pays out a fixed amount per stream ... b/c fans don't pay per stream. spotify users are bigger music fans (and the product inspires people to listen to more music) ... so the average "per stream rate" looks lower just b/c there are so many more streams on the service, as gustav is talking about in this clip. if other services had listeners that streamed as much music as spotify's do, their "average per stream" would drop ... but their paychecks and growth would go up. it's a very good thing for artists when streaming services have high engagement. we get into a bit more detail here: #spotify-listeners-stream-more" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">loudandclear.byspotify.com/faq/#spotify-l… if we wanted to get the "average per stream rate" higher, we could make the product worse so that people streamed less music (but then fewer and fewer people would sign up for spotify premium b/c they enjoy it less, so paychecks would fall). or you could change how streaming works and start charging fans per stream (which i think would make a lot less people use streaming, would push them to piracy, etc.). you could charge way more (and you can trust us that we're already charging the revenue-maximizing price b/c that's how we make our money, too). in general, we focus on maximizing paychecks, rather than a "per-stream rate" calculation. that's how we've grown the royalty pool from $1B per year to $11B per year in a decade.

@duboff @tbpn @GustavS I appreciate you taking the time to respond here. What would be the financial impact of 1¢ per stream? Would it ever be possible even if this means cutting revenue for executives?

Spotify co-CEO @GustavS says the biggest misconception about Spotify is that it pays artists less than other streaming companies. "[Spotify] paid out over $70B to the music industry, $11B of those just last year. That's more than anyone has paid anyone ever in the music industry."

thanks for the thoughtful reply and thanks for checking out loud & clear! one of the great things about our model is that incentives are aligned — close to 70% of the music revenue we make goes back to the music industry, so we grow together. i think the most important proof that our goal is what i'm saying it is that we've grown royalties from $1B per year a decade ago to $11B per year now. i know it's more fun to talk about the internet controversies, but that big picture is important. on functional music: definitely no royalty-free music. we corrected some misinformation in this FAQ: support.spotify.com/us/artists/art… on bundling: publishing payouts have been growing every year ($5B paid out over the past two years). in the US, we've just been following the rules set for streaming services around how bundles work. bundles work really well to bring in new audiences for music — someone signs up for audiobooks, for example, and then the majority of their monthly fee is going to the music royalty pool on that blog post: hadn't read it before but the premise is silly. he starts with the 'heat map' of what we 'talked about most' in the earnings call ... with 18 mentions of AI and podcast as number one and two. he does not include that "music" was mentioned 40+ times and "artist" was mentioned 20+ times. feels a bit bad faith, and just didn't want to share data that goes against his opinion. we're investing more in music than ever and shipping more features for music fans than ever ... in just the past few months, songdna, music videos in the US, about the song, expanded credits, prompted playlists, a new lyrics experience.

hey Sam, appreciate the earnest follow up. That is valid pushback on the study, and makes sense that headline is easily skewed. Thanks for the added context. I am very familiar with the reporting Spotify does, which deserves kudos for setting a standard in transparency. I suppose what concerns me is the stated mission seems at odds with various monetization / product-level decisions: There's Liz Pelly's research into royalty-free music jamming up playlists and algo recs, there's songwriter royalties shifting to audiobook publishers in the new bundling schema, and @musicben_eth's recent post (x.com/musicben_eth/s…) on Spotify's Q4 earnings call adds further clarity on where the business and product are headed. The actions seems at odds with the mission, atleast as it pertains to indie musicians needs - clearer monetization / audience ownership / D2F merchandising. This is not to say Spotify isn't trying to satisfy those artists' needs, just that it doesn't seem to be the priority from what people on the outside can decipher. Would love to connect and chat more about it.

@jayjeffwong @tbpn @GustavS spotify paid out $11B+ in 2025, up from $10B in 2024. youtube shared in june 2025 that they paid out $8B per year, which includes revenue from youtube dot com as well.

@tbpn @GustavS YouTube’s gotta pay out more, competition hasn’t just been “Apple” and “Amazon” for a while

superstars are doing really well on spotify, for sure! no artist has more than 1% of streams, but the top 80 earning artists each generated over $10 million per year. excitingly, payouts are growing faster for career artists than superstars. we published a great data point here about the 100,000th-ranked artist (compared to the 10th-ranked): #the-rising-100000th-artist" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">loudandclear.byspotify.com/takeaways/#the…

@tbpn @GustavS With probably most of that pool of funds being directed to Taylor Swift

hi there! very much aligned with your desire that we want streaming to pay as much as possible to professional artists! that's our whole mission at spotify. you're citing a study from 2020 (!!), which was a voluntary sample (meaning total selection bias about who responded and who didn't) that was collected for political purposes. unlike any other streaming service, we publish tons of transparent data about how much we pay out — including, for example, that our payouts have grown from $5B in 2020 to $11B last year. no other service shares their annual payout number. for most indie artists, we're >50% of their streaming revenue.

@tbpn @GustavS 92% of full-time artists surveyed by UK Artists Union said they make less than 5% of their income from streaming. Spotify will eventually get ditched by artists if it continues to function as an advertisement for artists' core business but gives no tools to drive fan conversion.

@geokonic__ @PopCrave the post is literally about how we paid out 10% more to artists in 2025 than 2024

@PopCrave only because they’re paying artists less and charging us more for no reason

Spotify has released its Loud & Clear report. The company paid out $11 billion+ to the music industry in 2025 with more than 50% of royalties going to indie artists and labels.

enjoyed breaking down 2025 spotify royalties with @musicbizworld musicbusinessworldwide.com/80-artists-gen…

today, we published our annual loud & clear report — sharing troves of transparent data about 2025 royalties on @Spotify. 5+ years in to loud & clear, we're still the only streaming service that shares royalty data like this b/c we think artists deserve to understand how streaming economics work and know the revenue opportunity on each service. i've attached some of my favorite takeaways to this tweet, but you can check out the report yourself at the link — including a 'payouts' section where you can see exactly how many artists generated different levels of revenue in 2025, from $1k through to $10m. loudandclear.byspotify.com

Today, we updated our annual Loud & Clear report, designed to demystify how artists earn money through streaming, and highlight the evolving global music landscape. We believe in showing you the full picture. That's why we share a level of royalty data that no other streaming service publishes. Spotify pays the majority of every dollar we generate from music back to your selected rights holders (record labels, publishers, PROs, collecting societies and distributors). 🎶In 2025, that added up to more than $11 billion, the the largest annual payment to music from any retailer. And these payouts aren’t concentrated to a small number of superstar artists, either. Once again, roughly half of royalties were generated by independent artists and labels. Spotify alone has now paid out nearly $70 billion all-time to music rights holders to date. 🧵Here are the 2025 Takeaways you need to know.

@TheLucasToday @PopBase we announced our transparency standard last fall and have been working with our partners on it since then: newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spo…

@PopBase apple quietly setting the standard that every other platform will eventually have to follow. the fact that AI disclosure isn't already mandatory everywhere is wild

Apple Music introduces AI transparency tags to disclose when AI was used in artwork, tracks, compositions and music videos.

@gardenofgag @PopBase @corneil_ri @Spotify we announced the system we're working on for AI transparency in the fall: newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spo…

@PopBase @corneil_ri .@Spotify you have 24 hours to respond or we are switching to Apple Music for good

Our editors pick the Greatest Pop Songs of the Streaming Era (2015-present) ✨ 100 songs that helped shape the sound of pop in the streaming era.