In April 2024, Spotify announced that songs on the platform that haven’t met a threshold of least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months would not be included in the recorded music royalty pool calculation, and therefore artists would not be paid for those plays.
I’ve covered this and a lot of Spotify’s recent practices that prompted me to jump ship, but with the first full year of this Spotify rule in place we have the published figures for a calendar year.
Thanks to the Luminate 2025 Year-End Music Report, we now know that:
88% of the available tracks were streamed fewer than 1000 times in 2025, which follows on that approximately 88% of songs on Spotify, the world’s biggest streaming platform didn’t make any money from the platform due to the demonetization rule.
Zero.
In the pyramid below, the only songs that made money on Spotify are the top two tiers – the white and top blue – 28.2 million out of a total of 253 million songs tracked.
120.5m tracks had 10 streams or less last year. 62.6m garnering 11-100, and 40.7m played between 101 and 1,000 times.
The idea of the Long Tail, coined by writer Chris Anderson in his book 20 years ago continues to be relevant – as independent professional music artists struggle to make a living from music if they’re not in the 12% of musicians who are receiving money from Spotify. It’s a stark fact.
Even of those 12% of artists making money, Spotify’s general established payout is is $0.003 per stream – which is a lot less than others (Qobuz is US$0.01873 per stream for example).
So 1,000 streams only nets an artist $3 (versus Qobuz’s $18 / Tidal’s $12 – see the Streaming Royalty Calculator for more) – it’s a pittance – how musicians are making money in 2026 is already bleak with rising costs of touring, the arrival of AI music adding to the noise and hardship of being a professional artist.
Musicians already know all of this but maybe some music fans still do not – the price of streaming your favourite songs and not following through with a further purchase of a vinyl record, merch or gig ticket is the difference between artists able to continue to create music or not (One vinyl sale could net an artist $20, while this translates to roughly 6,000 to 6,700 Spotify streams.)
In the US, the United Musicians & Allied Workers (UMAW) are promoting the establishment of the Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2025 – a bill that would create a new streaming royalty paid directly to artists, ensuring that artists and musicians can build sustainable careers in the digital age. The new royalty would be an additional revenue stream on top of artists’ existing royalties – a minimum of a penny per stream.
You can learn more on that here.
Luminate’s U.S. centric report also shares that streaming was up nearly 10% in 2024 compared to the previous year, Album streaming was up in the US, while digital sales were down but physical releases were up 6.5%. Some of these numbers are likely dependant on the timing and release of the Taylor Swift album Life Of A Showgirl.
Other interesting bits:
- Over 106,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services a day, up 7%.
- Nearly half (48.9%) of all Global Premium streams are from just four territories: the U.S., Mexico, Brazil and Germany. Although India is primarily an ad-supported market (84%), its premium streams grew by +42% this year.
- 44% of listeners say they would be less interested in listening to music if they knew it was produced with generative AI.
- The songwriters credited most often in the most-streamed 10,000 songs are Drake, Bad Bunny, Max Martin, Edgar Barrera aka Edge, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Jack Antonoff, Tainy, Pritam and Dr Luke.
- Here are the top 10 most streamed songs of 2025:
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
