As artists struggle for a foothold and a paycheck from subscription streaming services, a new study reveals that fewer than 15% of songs on digital platforms would have met Spotify’s new royalty payment threshold in 2023.
Luminate’s 2023 Year-End Music Report found that 24.8% of all tracks available on streaming services, some 45.6 million of them, did not receive any streams, and 86.2%, or 158.6 million tracks, were streamed fewer than a thousand times.
By these results, Spotify’s recent policy change – only offering royalties for songs with more than a thousand streams in the last 12 months – would offer the platform substantial savings, with the vast majority of tracks not qualifying for payment. Under the rules, functional tracks, such as white noise, will have even more stringent royalty qualifications, compared to music tracks.
This comes as Spotify CEO Daniel Ek faces mounting pressure from investors and shareholders for increased profitability. The push led to heavy layoffs in 2023.
Luminate goes on to report that, overall, global music streaming continues to soar, with over 7.1 trillion on-demand song streams for audio and video, marking a 33.7% year over year increase. However, only 10 tracks from 2023 were streamed more than a billion times.
For advertisers, this presents an opportunity to diversify their audio strategy, exploring genres and categories beyond the mainstream, and considering new sponsorship and segmentation possibilities.
