Spotify has 7 million artists on its platform.
Only 13,000 of them make more than $50,000 USD per year.
This means less than 0.2% of Spotify artists make more than the median US wage from their Spotify streaming revenue.
The non-linearity of Spotify’s payment model—with the vast majority going to record labels and the world’s biggest artists—is astounding.
Spotify may have saved music from piracy, and it’s algorithms are certainly helping millions of listeners find new music, but there is a still a long way to go before it achieves its goal of “giving a million creative artists the opportunity live off their art.”