Tag: ifpi

On Our $10 Billion Milestone and a Decade of Getting the World to Value Music

January 28, 2025

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 our founding. 

For a lot of people, those numbers might go in one ear and out the other. And they’d perhaps ask why Spotify keeps shouting about it.

It’s because the system we’ve built together is working, and where we are now is only the beginning. Today, there are more than 500 million paying listeners across all music streaming services. A world with 1 billion paying listeners is a realistic goal we should collectively set.

Growing the Pie

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. 

  1. 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.
  2. We offer an ad-supported free tier, while some services don’t. 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.
  3. We’re available in more markets and at local price points, meeting people where they are. 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, we’re seeing tremendous growth across markets like India, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria. These are places where our investments are paying off.

That’s our blueprint and it’s working. 

Growing Careers Beyond the Superstars

I recently read a data point from economist Will Page that said more music is released in a single day than there was in the entirety of 1989. 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. Everyone’s invited. 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. 

Case in point, we estimate 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. That’s a beautiful thing.

Think about this: Last year’s IFPI report indicated that Spotify contributes roughly a third of global recorded streaming revenue. But a recent comprehensive study of independent labels and distributors from MIDiA Research showed that Spotify represents more than half of indies’ streaming revenue. What this indicates is that Spotify’s model is uniquely enabling more room for more artists to find success and ultimately sustain a career in music, demonstrating real change across the music business.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Without a doubt, this has been a decade of unparalleled transformation. The global value of music copyright today sits at $45.5 billion. A decade on from its low point, how many other industries have experienced this kind of revival? 

Our 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. Onboarding people to paid streaming is precisely what has increased our payouts—tenfold—over the past decade. 

Reaching 1 billion paid subscribers across all streaming services will be a collaborative effort, requiring innovation, strategic partnerships, and a continued focus on delivering exceptional value to music fans worldwide. It’s a goal we’re confident we can achieve together.

– David Kaefer,

VP, Music Business, Spotify

Canadian Music Has Evolved Into a Global Export. Canada Must Evolve With It.

April 11, 2024

As the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) updates the country’s Broadcasting Act, it faces a fundamental question: Who counts as Canadian?

This question arises in the midst of unprecedented success for the Canadian music industry, especially on streaming platforms like Spotify. According to our latest Loud & Clear data, Canadian artists were discovered by first-time listeners more than 3.8 billion times last year. In addition, between 2018 and 2023, royalties generated by Canadian artists from Spotify alone more than doubled, exceeding $435 million CAD.

But as it currently stands, the CRTC system designed for radio employs certain criteria to decide whether a piece of audio content qualifies as Canadian or not, focusing on the location of production or performance and whether the writers and featured performers are exclusively Canadian.

This setup means that some of the most recognizable Canadian cultural success stories in recent years—many of them up-and-coming artists and those from diverse and historically marginalized communities who have changed the face of Canadian music—wouldn’t be considered Canadian by the CRTC. 

For example, in November 2023, Tate McRae’s “greedy” became the world’s most popular song on Spotify, spending four weeks at the top of the charts and garnering over 860 million plays globally. But despite being headlined by a Calgary-born artist who is one of her country’s biggest cultural exports, the song is unlikely to be counted as Canadian, as it only fulfills only some of the required criteria.

Similarly, through his 4N Records imprint, Punjabi-Canadian producer Ikky has built bridges between India’s exploding music scene, Canada, and the world, engaging over 8.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. 

For artists like Ikky and many others in genres like country or hip-hop (in which Canadian artists excel), the diverse backgrounds of collaborators are part of what makes their music distinctive and successful at home and around the world. 

In fact, 92% of all royalties generated by Canadian artists on Spotify in 2023 were from listeners outside of Canada. But the Canadian music market’s revenue is also growing. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) Global Music Report—which is an assessment of the music industry as a whole—Canada is outpacing the global industry with 12.2% revenue growth last year (compared to 10.2% globally). And on Spotify, Canadian artists are generating revenue at an even faster rate: When compared to 2022, their revenue grew by more than 15% in 2023. 

But for Canadian artists with a global mindset, much of their work falls outside the CRTC definition of Canadian programming today. 

Redefining ‘Canadian’

In light of the success Canadian artists are finding on Spotify today, we think it’s important for the CRTC to prioritize work toward an updated definition of Canadian and Indigenous music, as the Trudeau government directed it to do—especially if Canadian artists want to continue using Spotify to grow their audience. 

More broadly, a definition of Canadian and Indigenous music that works with the global realities of Canada’s contemporary music industry will ensure that Canadian artists continue to succeed at home and around the world.