On Tuesday, Spotify published its annual Loud & Clear report, which provides detailed information about the music streaming service’s royalty payments. Earlier this year, Spotify disclosed that it had paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024. The new report offers more in-depth numbers on its payments, aiming to address reports that the company does not fairly compensate artists for their work.

According to the report, for the first time, an artist who received one in every million streams on Spotify earned an average of over $10,000 in 2024, which is 10 times what the same stream share would have generated a decade ago.

Despite Spotify’s claims of increased payouts, many artists and songwriters are still demanding fair compensation. Recently, several Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted Spotify’s songwriter of the year Grammy party due to the music streaming service’s decreasing royalties. Billboard estimates that writers stand to lose around $150 million over 12 months due to a change introduced by Spotify last year.

Furthermore, a report from Duetti (which Spotify has previously dismissed) found that Apple Music pays artists twice as much as Spotify. The report revealed that Spotify paid artists $3.0 per 1,000 streams, whereas other platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube paid $8.8, $6.2, and $4.8, respectively, per 1,000 streams in 2024.

In response to the report, Spotify stated that the claims are “ridiculous and unfounded” and that “no streaming service pays per stream.”

Spotify’s new report attempts to address these concerns by explaining its payout model and how artists and publishers earn revenue on its platform.

The company explained that “major streaming services all calculate payouts the same way: based on streamshare. If an artist’s catalog accounts for 1% of total streams, it would earn 1% of total royalties.” Spotify also noted that “streaming services don’t pay out based on a fixed per-stream rate — just like listeners don’t pay per song they listen to.”

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has been advocating for Spotify to fairly compensate artists, particularly independent and smaller artists who are struggling to make a living. Last year, Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Congressman Jamaal Bowman introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act in partnership with UMAW, which proposes increasing streaming royalties for musicians to one cent per stream.

A UMAW spokesperson stated, “It’s easy to calculate what Spotify pays directly to recording artists: $0. There is no direct payment to recording artists by Spotify because the company claims its manner of streaming falls under no existing regulation or requirement for direct payments to musicians.”

The spokesperson added, “This needs to change. UMAW supports the Living Wage for Musicians Act to close this loophole and make streaming pay the musicians who create the content for Spotify and other platforms.”

Spotify’s report highlights that its payments are improving, despite concerns from the industry. The report reveals that the number of artists generating royalties has tripled since 2017.

A decade ago, the top artist on Spotify earned just over $5 million, while today, more than 200 artists have surpassed that milestone.

Over the past decade, the 10,000th-ranked artist on Spotify has seen their royalties increase almost 4x, from $34,000 to $131,000, while the 100,000th-ranked artist has seen their generated royalties multiply by over 10x, increasing from under $600 in 2014 to almost $6,000 in 2024.

Additionally, Spotify revealed that nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify alone last year. The company noted that 80% of these artists didn’t have a song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart in 2024, indicating that many of them are not household names.

Spotify also shared that the artists who generated at least $100,000 in royalties were recording music in over 50 languages in 2024, while the artists who generated at least $1 million on Spotify recorded music in 17 different languages.