13,800 Artists Generated $100k on Spotify in 2025

The 2026 Loud & Clear report from Spotify is out now, and if you're not familiar with what this is, essentially every year Spotify does a report looking over the previous year's worth of data and coming up with some cool metrics on how the streaming economy is working for artists and for the platform as a whole, but also just looking at really just the whole music industry. And this year in particular was, I believe, the 20th anniversary of Spotify. But this year's Loud & Clear, in addition to kind of comparing a lot of historical metrics and growth in the platform over the last 20 or so years, it also has looked at how things have impacted indies in particular. It's not necessarily just about the biggest artists in the world. A lot of the metrics in this year's Loud & Clear were focused on the indie economy, which can mean a lot of things, which we'll get into, but first let's just start going through the metrics. >> Andrew [music and singing] Southworth, the music marketing guy. >> Now, I will be linking this down below so you can go through this yourself. There are a lot of different sections, but mostly going to be looking at the takeaways, but there is a lot of great information about payouts and process and policy roadmap that I highly recommend reading through because the the more you know about how streaming and Spotify, particularly being the biggest streaming service, works, the the better you can just understand your music business, essentially. So, uh let's get into the takeaways. I'm going to click explore now. And we're going to get into it. I'm going to accept their cookie tracking so that annoying message goes away. So, um let's go here first. Let me zoom in. So, the first metric, the big takeaway you've probably already seen in in news channels online before and on social media, is Spotify paid out $11 billion in 2025 to rights holders. Rights holders being artists and labels. That doesn't necessarily mean that artists received that money. This comes up every time Spotify or any other platform talks about how much money artists made is people always want to try and look smart by saying, "Well, actually, you know, with a big K, actually, uh artists didn't get that money because they might have a record deal. They might only be getting 10% of the blah blah blah, right? That's We all know that. Spotify paid out 11 billion to the artists and labels. Depending on what the individual deal that that artist has will drastically change what the artist actually receives. They might be getting 100% of that money. They might be getting none of that money if they haven't recouped their label deal. So, keep that in mind. That's how the music industry works, and we'll move past it. So, they paid out 11 billion dollars last year 2024 again, in the report again in 2023, it was 10 billion. So, they're accruing an extra billion dollars in the last year, which is kind of crazy thinking of that in in the grand scheme of all the crazy stuff that happened with Spotify in the last year that it still grew by a billion dollars. So, that means that Spotify took in even more money, right? Cuz the essentially the way that all these streaming platforms work is they pay out essentially a percentage of all the money they take in. So, Spotify, Apple Tidal YouTube Music, etc. They all pay about 70% of the money they take in. They pay that out to artists and labels, aka rights holders. Uh and about a fifth of that goes for publishing, and 4/5 of that roughly is for the recorded royalties. So, with that out of the way, the other part about this is that more than 50% of the royalties were generated by indies. One thing worth mentioning here though is the definition of indie is a little bit weird. Um a lot of people will hear indie, and they'll be like, "Whoa. That means like like me. Like when I go and upload my music to DistroKid, I'm an indie." And yes, you are. But it also means Disney. Disney is an independent record label. Essentially, indie in in Billboard and again, if you look at the indie Billboard charts, you're going to be you're going to throw up with who what's considered indie because it's it's crazy. Um essentially, indie is anything that's not Sony, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group. So, keep that in mind. This is still a amazing metric that half of the royalties are generated by indies. That's a great step in the right direction, but make sure you understand that doesn't necessarily mean it's just individual artists that aren't signed to a label. There's a ton of really, really large independent record labels. One really cool stat here is Spotify comparing the growth of artists who are generating at least $100,000 a year on Spotify. In 2025, 13,800 artists made over $100,000 in 2025 from Spotify alone. And there's something off screen here that you can't see. I can scroll down to it, but uh generally, if you're making you're going to make three times that amount if you include all the other DSPs and other recorded music royalties, it'll be about you like you're making three times the amount total once you include all the other DSPs and other recording royalty sources. And then of course you have live and you have merch and you have Patreon, you have all this other stuff you can do. Um so, if you're making 100k from just Spotify alone, you're doing quite well, right? You You're probably making at least $300,000. When I posted about this on Threads, a lot of people were saying like, "Well, if you're in a five-person band and you have a label deal and you have a manager deal, you're not even making enough to live." And it's like, "Yeah, that's true, but that's that's a separate thing, right? This is just people are people who have generated $100,000, um which is a killing, like a fantastic amount to make as an artist just from one streaming DSP alone, cuz that's really the start of a fan relationship. So, but the real cool part of this metric isn't just the number. In a perfect world, this will keep growing. The important part of this metric is how much it's changed over the last five years. It's roughly doubled. If you look at the amount of artists making $100,000 a year and $50,000 a year, it's roughly doubled in the past five years, which is a good sign. That's that's a very significant amount of money to be making as a music artist. And that's a very significant amount of artists pulling it off, and it's a very significant growth. One thing to consider on the negative side, because I'm not here just to tell you about all the positives, there are about 12 million artists on Spotify. So, this is a very small minority of artists making making a six-figure income from Spotify alone. It's still It's a lot of money, right? Cuz you Again, this is you're making 300,000 just from recorded the royalty services alone or sources alone. Um but it's out of 12 million artists. It But bring that up just to say that most artists on Spotify are casual. They're not people who are trying to make a career out of music. They uploaded one song for fun 5 years ago and never did anything else. That's like probably 8 million out of 12 million artists or something like that are are casuals. Like they weren't trying to do it as a career. It's the same thing on YouTube. If you were look at channels that uploaded videos versus channels that are monetized, it's actually much more grim than the amount of channels that are monetized on Spotify versus the total number of of profiles on Spotify. So, massive growth for the number of artists that have made 100,000 dollars a year. Going on to the next section, we start talking about artists who are making millions on Spotify alone. So, a decade ago, the very top artists on Spotify reached 10 million in annual royalties for the first time. Today, there are 80 artists generating 10 million dollars annually from Spotify alone. More than 1,500 artists generated a million dollars in royalties from Spotify alone in 2025. And the cool One really cool metric that that I shared online already somewhere. And and fun fact, I interviewed Sam Duboff, who is the global head of policy, marketing and policy at Spotify. Uh that video is coming next week, so make sure you subscribe if you're not already. And uh It was my favorite statistic that he told me, and it's listed right here, actually. Um In fact, capturing just 1% of streams from 1% of listeners on Spotify is enough to earn a million dollars in annual royalties on Spotify. Which some people think is a grim thing because there's 750 million users on Spotify. So this says you need like a 1% of streams from 1 7.5 million of listeners. It's not an easy thing to pull off. Um but I think it's cool to hear that 99% of people on the biggest streaming platform in the world can have never heard your music at all. And you can still make a million dollars a year, which is an enormous sum of money to be making in any field, but especially in music. It's an enormous amount of money to be making from cuz again, you're probably making three million dollars a year from other much to clear everything else. You're make you're you're in the top 0.01% or whatever of music artists in the world. Um and you can do that with having 99% of the world having no idea who you are. To me is a humbling metric. It makes me feel like I don't need to be a household name. It's not a bad metric in my opinion. But but that's what I've heard online. Now the next stat is also kind of going back to Indies in a way. The it talks about the the concept of the 100,000th highest earning artist. So we're not looking at the top 10 or top 80 or the top 500 or whatever. We're looking at the 100,000th artist on Spotify. So if you ranked every artist on Spotify from 1 to 12 million or whatever the number is and look at number 100,000. How much did they make? Now compared to 2015, which is what this graph shows. Or this whatever you call this graphic. 2025 they made $7,300. And the 100,000th artist in 2015 made $350, which is a 20x increase in growth. So the 100,000th artist got a 20x raise on Spotify in in 10 years. the in inflation metric is about 30%. So, this is a 2,000% increase compared to a 30% increase. So, this did out like a lot of people will say like, well, inflation was massive in the last 10 years. So, yes, it was. But, uh this growth is actually absolutely insane. And And the reason for this growth essentially is there's even more people in in the system streaming music. And also the the distribution of like essentially like wealth or stream share from artist is less concentrated at the top. It's getting spread a little bit more, which I believe they talk about somewhere else in these in these charts. Um but anyways, it's a huge raise to to grow the $100,000 by a factor of 20 in a decade is a big change. This one uh initially got me very excited. There is a spin to this though. And I'll let you be excited first before I you know, ruin your day. Uh more than a third of artists generating $10,000 or more a year on Spotify were DIY or started their careers as DIY. So, when I first read this real quick, I was like, wow, a third of artists generating over $10,000 a year on Spotify are DIY, just like me, right? Before it Well, half the money that's getting paid out is to indies, people like me using DistroKid and other like indie distros and not in the label, yada yada yada. Well, this is where the caveat of were were DIY or started their careers as DIY. That caveat of started their careers as DIY is what makes this a less exciting metric. It's still a cool metric, again. And I really wish I could see that separately. Like, I want to know how many people are currently DIY generating 10,000 plus. What percentage of that? How many of these artists are there? What percentage of the 100,000 um $100,000 a year artists are currently DIY versus started careers as DIY? Um it's It's a cool metric either way, but it's just I would like to know that difference and I'm expecting it to be small. So to me it's a it's a shame that we don't have that metric. And and honestly, this is probably metric I could request. Um I I they the the Spotify people Sam Duboff and a couple of people team said, feel free to email us if you have any questions. They obviously can't answer everything. Um but they're they've been very open and transparent and honestly, if you're on Threads and you just follow Sam Duboff because he often will share a lot of information. Uh and if you just make a post and tag him and ask him stuff about Spotify, just be friendly because he's a cool dude. Um and he's very transparent about the stuff. He might be able to give you more information than what's on these pages. And I really like one that I haven't said this yet. Loud and clear exists at all, right? Apple Music doesn't do this. YouTube Music doesn't do this. None of the other DSPs give us any transparency behind what happens. On one hand, these metrics are a little bit self-congratulatory. Um but keep in mind this is a company being a company. So obviously they're they're doing this for a few reasons. One to be transparent, but two to show people how helpful they are to the music industry. Um but that's a business. So um the fact that like Sam is out there answering questions and doing stuff online, the fact that this exists at all is a massive win. And while we should always hold Spotify accountable for all the things we don't think are great, I think it's worth reflecting on moments like this that none of the other platforms do this, period. So going back into it, I'm sure I'm going to get called a Spotify shill in the comments for saying that, but that's my opinion. 50% comes from abroad. Only 2 years after your first release on average artists at all levels see most of the royalties coming from abroad. And there's another chart in this that we're going to see in a moment um that that kind of takes us to a different angle. But essentially this means that you the the music industry is getting more global, which makes sense on Spotify because like they've been expanding markets like from from 2019 to 2023 they like tripled the number of countries that that have Spotify or something like that. And it's cool to see that that's like the international thing is just getting more and more prominent and different languages of music have been spreading further and further and further. And I have another stat here. In 2025 the artists who generated half a million dollars in Spotify royalties represent 75 different countries, whereas a year ago it was only 66. So the the artists who are elevating to the top are getting more and more culturally diverse. So on one hand the the we have less like dominant leads at the top. The major labels are losing market share. And the pool of people is getting more indie, even if it's still like big indie. And it's getting more and more diverse from different countries. Which I think is a good thing. And this next slide confirms that. It's also more languages. This year 16 different languages reached Spotify's global top 50. This is talking about the top 50, so this is including the big the big dogs. But that's double the number of 2020. So again, the language is getting more diverse. The country is getting more diverse. It's getting more spread out. Um which is a good thing, right? This is all like independent music from all the way around the world from different cultures and different languages is is growing and taking market share away from the people who are desperately trying to maintain essentially the major labels and the the kind of establishment of music industry, which is cool cool stuff. One thing on the podcast, which if you don't follow the My Point Four Cents podcast you you should. I'll link to it down below. Um and Matt Bacon on the podcast pointed out that none of these country labels or none of these language labels are actually correct. Um or not not that none of them are, but a lot of them are wrong. Songwriters New Heights. Now at the Loud & Clear event, I was invited to the official like Loud & Clear reveal 2 days before all this information went live, which is very cool cuz I got to ask questions. They reported that in 2025, Spotify delivered the highest annual publishing payout in history, which is great. Publishing royalties, if you're not familiar, essentially it's the royalties for songwriting. So, you if you may not know this, but when you upload your music to DistroKid or TuneCore or whatever, um unless you well, let me let me ignore this for a second. If you upload your music to DistroKid and most distributors, the money you're getting is just from the recording. There's a separate royalty that gets paid to a a performance rights organization and also a mechanical rights organization for the songwriting portion of the royalty. Because if you you might have a situation where a label owns a song, but they used a song written by another songwriter that they partnered with to release that song. And the songwriter would get the songwriting royalties and the publisher gets the publishing royalties out of that total publishing payout. And over the last 2 years, they paid out 5 billion dollars to that publishing royalties. They paid out 11 billion dollars overall. But over the last 2 years, they paid out 5 billion. I don't know why they don't say the number annually, but we do know it's the highest paying out in history and it's 5 billion over the last 2 years and that it's grown by 2.5x over the past 5 years. So, let's just say it's 3 billion. So, they paid out 3 billion publishing and they paid out 11 billion total. So, 8 billion to to um recording and 3 billion to publishing. Who knows why they don't they won't I asked, "What is the exact number for this year?" and they wouldn't say. Maybe they don't have it calculated yet. Who knows? But I found that to be odd. I couldn't think of a reason why they can't share the number. Uh and then the last slide in this takeaway section, at least, I have some juicy bonus information I'll share right after, is that the ticket sales from Spotify are actually kind of significant. I have been wondering this because about half of the shows I go to a year I find out from Spotify. I open up Spotify app on my phone to listen to music and it's like, "Hey, this artist is playing near you in like 3 months." And like, "Sick." Then I click buy tickets and it takes me to ticket page and I buy a ticket. It's awesome. Like it's great that like it just knows what I listen to and there's also a section you can go to if you just want to like if you're like, "I want to go to go to some shows." There's a section you can go. I don't know how to get to it. I always just Google it. Like Spotify local shows. And then it takes you to a page where it shows you of all the music you like who's like coming to town in the next like 6 to 9 months or something, which is really cool. Apparently they drove 1.5 billion dollars of ticket sales in 2025, which is great because that is like just the translation of online stuff into real world money. And the ticket industry is huge. Like this is a very small percentage in the grand scheme of the live music industry, which I think I heard was like 40 billion dollars or something like that. I'm I'm just going off of memory, but it's it's tens of billions of dollars. 40 billion plus per year. Um so to add an extra 1.5 billion is significant. It's it's not like all of the ticket industry, but that's a big bump for a streaming platform. Cuz I remember on Apple Music and Tidal and YouTube Well, YouTube Music you can link shows, but it's a little limited. Tidal and Apple, I don't think you have any way to promote your shows to your fans. Whereas in Spotify you do and you can do it with Bandsintown, which doesn't even require you to be like a big time artist. Any artist can have a Bandsintown if you play live shows. And 40% of touring artists, which they define as anyone who's had a show in 2025 as a touring artist, saw a at least a 10% increase in their overall uh Spotify revenue driven by ticket sales. So essentially a 10% increase in their overall like ticket sales uh for touring artists, which is incredible because that's great, right? For a lot of artists, their live the live side of their business is often the thing that funds the whole endeavor. They might lose money on their streaming or they might not make almost anything off their streaming. For most artists, they make between 25% and 50% of their income from streaming. And a lot of the rest of that revenue is from live. It might be from merch or Patreon, depending on the artist, but live revenue is a very significant thing for for a pretty large chunk of artists nowadays. Now, you may be wondering, Andrew, what is the bonus things do you have for this? And I actually have two bonus things for you today. One, in the call that I mentioned that I had before Loud & Clear came out, they mentioned that 90% of the revenue that Spotify makes and or and pays out is from paid subscribers. And only 10% of that revenue is from the free tier. So, the immediate question from that is, why don't you just get rid of the free tier? If 90% of your revenue is from subscriptions? Well, there's actually a good answer for that. And that is that 60% of premium users start out on a free tier. And so, they attribute most of their dramatic growth and like dominance because they are like Spotify has more users, paying users, than Apple and YouTube Music combined. And I think even and Amazon Music combined. So, they are like in a dominant lead. And they attribute that largely to the fact that they have this free tier that does a really good job of driving people to the pay tier. Um they said it in a very nice way and that, you know, they see how awesome the product is and they subscribe. I think the yes, they see how awesome the product is, but then they get so annoyed by the advertisements that they're just like, fine, have $13 a month, whatever. Um but anyways, it was kind of a cool metric because I never knew that that was the number, which is great. Now, they also debuted a new thing on Spotify for artists that you're going to be very glad that you stayed and waited for this. Um I think there's a minimum requirement of like 5,000 active monthly listeners to get this feature. But, it's called Song DNA and the purpose of it is when you're looking at a song in the Spotify app, which if you're an artist and you have over 5,000 active monthly listeners, if they like the essentially the Spotify account you log into your Spotify artist account, you can go to your artist on there and you can preview Song DNA. And essentially what you do is in the back end of Spotify for Artists, you can see your credits. So, they pop up. This is what I sent in from the distributor. I can hide credits in Song DNA and I could add extra credits to Song DNA. And they don't even have to be part of the stuff that came along for the for the ride when Song DNA when when the song was distributed. Um which essentially means you can kind of update credits in a cool way. But, the nice thing is all of these names and stuff become clickable. So, if someone's looking at my band, they can go in and look at my like performance credits, my writing credits, and my production credits. And they can click on me and learn more about me as a person and find other stuff that I've worked on, which is sick. It's almost like the experience you get when you're you get a vinyl record or something and you're looking at the credits and then you go on Discogs and you look at their whole like you know, look at um Alan Douches who who I had on the channel, which I'll try to remember to link a video here when I interviewed him, prolific mastering engineer. Um he's mastering my band's vinyl that comes out in in um April. He did the master for the vinyl vinyl record. And you could I would I saw his name in a in a record and I looked him up on Discogs and then on Discogs I saw all the other stuff he worked on. I'm like, "Whoa, he works on all this cool stuff." Um this is kind of like that. You can look at the the Song DNA and you can see, "Wow, this person worked on this." You can click on their name and you can go learn more about other stuff they've done in the music industry, which I'm very stoked about and I hope more of this happens because I I think that's just great way to hear more about the people that you love making the stuff that you enjoy. So, anyways, I hope you found this helpful. Click the link down below to explore the Loud & Clear for yourself. And make sure you subscribe to the interview with Sam Duboff. And if you want to see how you can market your music on Spotify and other DSPs and just in general, uh check out this playlist right here to learn all about that. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next video. Bye.