Glad to see that there’s a growing number of artists that are bailing on Spotify. Here’s a article by one such artist: https://kaukolampi.space/spotify-2017-2025.
For me, the last straw was Spotify’s further foray into AI ‘artists’. And their reworking of the TOS to further shaft artists. Their ‘new’ product is like Discovery, basically making Spotify a pay to play platform. It might not be so bad if they weren’t the dominant streaming platform, with about 30% of the market, but Ek, like all techbros, isn’t satisfied with his dominant position. The only good news is that the other 70% of the industry isn’t as rapacious, at least yet.
I virtually stopped all promotion of my music on Spotify over a year ago, when they decided that 1,000 streams was the threashold that your music had to garner in a year before Spotify begain to pay artists. And Spotify’s payout is 1/3 less than the next worse platform, Apple Music. These are the numbers I get from my distributor, DistroKid.
And the payout that Spotify does deign to give has dropped precipitantly, falling from $.0043 in 2020 to the last numbers I got in 2024 of $.0027. These numbers include both paid and non-paid subscribers. And for non-paid subscribers, the four to five ads you have to put up with between songs garners what I’m guessing is making Spotify between $0.075 and $0.105 per song. This guess is figuring that Spotify charges about the same CPM as other social media companies charge.
1,000 streams doesn’t seem like a large number, but non-mainstream music isn’t promoted at all on Spotify, and Spotify’s threat to delist you if you use third-party promotion services, some of which use the same bots that big artists use to inflate their streaming numbers, is disengenuous to say the least. The 1,000 stream threashold is difficult to meet for non-major electronic musicians like myself. I know, some trolls will say you should create music that the great unwashed wants to listen to, but most artists are musicians first, businessmen second. And I create music that suits me, not some schmuck bean counter.
And the alternative, using Spotify’s promotion services, is obscenely uncompetitive. Promotion on Spotify, with no guarantee of payback, starts at $100 per promotion. At ridiculous amount to spend, considering that you would need to get almost 44,000 streams to break even. I’ve only had a dozen or so of the almost 100 releases reach or exceed that number. And the $100 spend doesn’t even guarantee you plays.
By the way, this article has undergone a number of revisions. You might like to check back to see if I’ve added more content or subscribe to my WordPress blog, if you like my content.
