Spotify's Year in Music shows just how little we pay artists for their music - The Verge

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke pulled some of his solo work from the service earlier this year and said that the streaming service hardly pays new artists. Other artists such as Aimee Mann and the Black Keys have purposefully kept new releases off of the service for fear it would cannibalize sales.

Spotify's Year in Music shows just how little we pay artists for their music - The Verge

Now the startup is making an aggressive push to prove that it can make artists money. These rights holders, typically music labels and publishers, then pay artists a portion of the royalties, an amount that varies depending on individual record contracts.

Spotify expects these figures to increase dramatically as its revenue increases but the number of artists splitting the money remains more or less the same. Note that these are the total royalty payments split between record labels, music publishers, songwriters and artists. The picture is obviously not as rosy as these currency converter rubles to dollars would indicate for smaller acts.

The disclosures may help Spotify convince more acts to put their music on the service.

But the company, which is not profitable, faces an ever-growing number of music streaming competitors, soon to include YouTube. Spotify may generate big dollars how much money does an artist make from spotify artists one day, but it will have to convince a fractured listening audience that its platform is worth paying for.

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Spotify for Artists

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