Spotify creates a website with infographics and royalty statistics

The streaming platform Spotify has embarked on a debate about fair pay for music creators from online music services. This topic was discussed at the highest level. In response, Spotify has created a website called Loud & Clear, where every copyright holder can be sure of the fairness of payments.

In most cases, this will only be a small consolation: on Spotify, a song with 100,000 consistent streams can only make it to the top 2,710,000 tracks on the platform. However, Spotify reported other numbers as well. Throughout its history, the company has paid copyright holders more than $23 billion in royalties – more than $5 billion in 2020 alone. More than a million musicians are represented on the platform with an audience of more than 1,000 listeners.

All this does not negate the fact that the vast majority of musicians received from streaming services for the year the amount not exceeding the cost of living. Instead, 870 copyright holders received royalties from Spotify of $1 million or more. In such a situation, many streaming services – for example, SoundCloud – in response to criticism, are already trying to change the algorithms for distributing royalties.

As for Spotify, Charlie Hellman, vice president and head of sales for the company, admitted that their research did not offer any hope of radical change, although “Spotify is open to change”. Part of the problem is that payments from streaming services don’t go directly to artists, but are paid to copyright holders.