In 2014, the music industry reached a low point when global recorded music revenues hit $13 billion. Spotify’s annual contribution at the time was around $1 billion, with around 15 million paying subscribers. In 2024, Spotify alone paid out a record $10 billion to the music industry — totaling nearly $60 billion since their founding.
It’s a milestone that Spotify has achieved as the system that the world’s top audio streaming platform has built is working, and where they are now is only the beginning. Today, there are more than 500 million paying listeners across all music streaming services.
There’s a vibrant marketplace of streaming services for different types of consumers, each doing its part to normalize the behavior of paying for music streaming. It’s been a collective effort. But there are a few things specific to Spotify that make it not only the most popular subscription streaming service but also the highest paying.
Retention is priority number one, and retention is driven by personalization, curation, and product innovation. Fans like the recommendations, the expert editorial curation, and surprise-and-delight moments like AI DJ, daylist, and Wrapped, as well as the access to non-music content. They keep coming back, discovering more new artists, and retaining their subscriptions.
Spotify offers an ad-supported free tier. Beyond the ad dollars this generates, more than 60% of Premium subscribers were once free tier users. Bringing in users who don’t expect to pay for music, and deepening their engagement, means they’re more inclined to become subscribers in the future.
A decade ago, there was a widely held view that you couldn’t monetize certain markets. But the journey of getting the world to pay for music means making long-term investments. Today, Spotify is seeing tremendous growth across markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria. These are places where the platform’s investments are paying off.
“In the pre-streaming era, you were either in the club or not. If you didn’t have a label deal or the means to distribute your music worldwide, you weren’t one of the few thousand artists on shelves at a record store or one of the 40 in rotation on a radio station. Now, you can record something today and have it on Spotify tomorrow. Even better, payments to the music industry have shifted from a concentrated few at the top to an increasingly diverse and growing ecosystem of artists finding success”, said David Kaefer, VP, Music Business, Spotify.
“Case in point, Spotify estimated that, in 2014, around 10,000 artists generated at least $10,000 per year on Spotify. Today, well over 10,000 artists generate over $100,000 per year from Spotify alone”, he added.
The global value of music copyright today sits at $45.5 billion. Spotify’s goal is to help artists get their work in front of existing and future fans, continue to innovate on their behalf, and deliver it in a way that inspires people to pay for it.
