Spotify Says 25% of ‘Professional or Professionally Aspiring’ Artists Made Over $10K on the Platform in 2022

In 2022, about 57,000 artists earned more than $10,000 in royalties from Spotify, the company disclosed Wednesday (March 8) in the latest report published to Loud & Clear, a microsite that provides transparency into the amounts Spotify pays to creators on its platform.

That works out to just 0.6% of artists on Spotify making at least $10,000 in royalties. But using Spotify’s narrow definition of “professional or professionally aspiring” artists, more than a quarter of that group earned more than $10,000 on the platform in 2022.

How did Spotify get to that figure? Of the 9 million artists who have uploaded music to Spotify, 3.4 million have published 10 or more songs. From that group, only 213,000 artists average at least 10,000 monthly listeners, an amount Spotify calls “the beginning of an audience.” For context, newcomer Peyton Parrish, the No. 99 artist on Billboard’s Artist 100 chart, has 1.26 million monthly listeners on Spotify. There were 57,000 artists with at least 120,000 monthly listeners in 2022, according to Loud & Clear.

A similar data point came from Spotify’s integration with Songkick, Ticketmaster and other ticketing platforms: In 2022, 189,000 artists had at least one ticketed concert or event. Spotify says that “demonstrat[es] professional activity outside streaming.”

The number of artists making at least $10,000 on Spotify increased 144%, up from 23,400 in 2017. The upper echelon of Spotify payouts grew at about the same rate: 1,060 artists made more than $1 million in royalties in 2022, a 130% increase from 460 in 2017.

But the growth in the number of artists hitting these mile markers hasn’t kept pace with the overall growth of the platform. From 2017 to 2022, Spotify’s subscriber base grew 189% to 205 million, the number of ad-supported monthly active users rose 217% to 295 million and total revenues (which now includes some podcast advertising) increased 187% to 11.72 billion euros ($12.4 billion).