Spotify Will Change Its Artist Pay System

Spotify, the world’s number one audio platform, will change the way it pays artists in 2024, introducing a limited number of plays to unlock the right to pay, it announced on Tuesday.

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Spotify’s payment system will evolve to meet three imperatives: “to further encourage artificial streaming, to better distribute smaller fees that may not reach artists, and to put a brake on those trying to game the system by focusing on non-musical “sounds,” he explains on his website for artists.

Spotify estimates that by addressing each of these issues, it could generate about $1 billion in additional revenue for “emerging and professional artists over the next five years.”

From the beginning of 2024, it will introduce at least 1,000 plays on the platform in 12 months so that it can be paid.

Spotify explains that below this threshold, titles currently earn an average of $0.03 per month and are not affected by rights holders when in total they represent 40 million dollars.

“We will use these millions of dollars annually to increase payouts for eligible bonds,” the site says.

In its fight against artificial streaming created specifically by robots, Spotify announces that it will “bill labels and distributors for every title where blatantly artificial streaming is detected.”

The amount of this withholding is not specified.

The first global study on this topic estimates that by early 2023, between 1% and 3% of online listening will be incorrect, according to 2021 data from the National Center for Music (CNM) in France.

A third evolution of its payment system will raise the terms on which Spotify will pay royalties for listening to non-musical “sounds” (animal sounds, nature sounds, etc.).

Titles of this type of noise must be at least two minutes long and Spotify will negotiate with these rights holders to “value noise streams at a fraction of the value of music streams”.

“It’s a start,” Christine Graziani, boss of music distribution platform Stem, said of Spotify’s planned changes in early November, while ruling that they were “not in a good direction.”