Spotify Paid $10B to the Music Industry in 2024, $1B More Than Last Year

It&#x27;s a shame Spotify is just going to get killed by large music groups and anti-competitive platforms from Google and Apple.<p>Spotify pays out 80% of its money to its creators, but you effectively have large middle men in the way.<p>Apple and Google don&#x27;t even need to turn a profit on their platforms, and both of them are hurting Spotify directly by taking 30% of their subscription payments. Neither of them even directly report revenue from their services.<p>Think about it, Apple or Google make more net profit from Spotify subscriptions than Spotify does.<p>Meanwhile, TikTok only pays per the number of videos using your music, not the number of times the videos are played. The only worse deal for artists would to not be paid at all...

I think Spotify&#x27;s payment model is flawed, not the large number they pay out, but how they distribute it.<p>If I pay them EUR 10 per month and listen to 200 songs by seven artists&#x2F;bands, I would like Spotify to first take what they need to run the service (and make a profit) from the money. Then I would like the rest of my payment to be divided among the artists of the songs I listened to.<p>Because Spotify seems to pool all payments into one large sum, if an artist has some fans who listens 500x each to their songs then those fans will &quot;siphon off&quot; my payment to their favourite artist.

Wow, that’s a back rub of a puff piece even for a trade rag. Hix In Stix Love Context-free Stats might be a better title. It conflates data from multiple, unrelated years, makes no mention of how their traffic or revenue grew during those years and tries to pass blame onto amorphous “rights holders” who are the ones really taking too much money.

You can argue back and forth over how much they pay and how its distributed.<p>For me personally its a black and white divide. I pay for Spotify and something gets put back in to the industry or we all pretend its 2005 again and start sailing the high seas so nothing goes back.<p>I&#x27;m sure with a 1gb up&#x2F;down home connection its easier than ever.

&gt;&gt; In 2023, the company said it pays out nearly 70% to the industry<p>Does not stop there; there are tiers of middlemen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kVY7-Ti77UQ?si=2neBSw4yJL7qGdxX&amp;t=441" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;kVY7-Ti77UQ?si=2neBSw4yJL7qGdxX&amp;t=441</a>

Ignoring the 425M free users (where ad revenue comes in), given that Spotify has 250M paying users, that it translates to $3.33&#x2F;month&#x2F;user being paid to the music industry. This isn&#x27;t a lot. And in maybe a more benevolent world where automatic tipping a coffee&#x27;s amount of money to a weighted-distribution of your favorite music artists every month is a thing (think: one dropping change money into the hat &#x2F; empty guitar box of a performing street music artist), that we could not only have way better open music clients but also have this $3.33&#x2F;month go directly to the artists. This is predicated on benevolence, as in this case music will be free to download in the first place.

Q2&#x27;23: 343mm MAU<p>Q2&#x27;24: 393mm MAU<p>They have 114% the users and paid 111% the royalties. Seems reasonable.

A much better model would be that Spotify split the monthly revenue from each user amongst the artists they listened to that month.

I don&#x27;t use Spotify at all, I still buy my music (direct from the artist if I can) so I have the mp3s. No messy bs with some streaming service that can cut off my music.

Spotify is part of the music industry.

thats it?