Spotify released a review of its 2025 royalty data on Monday in its annual Loud & Clear report. Published just before the streaming giant’s 20th anniversary, the latest dispatch touts record-breaking payouts to demonstrate its place at the center of a thriving music industry, despite criticism of the streaming economy from artists and songwriters.

The 2026 Loud & Clear report illustrates Spotify’s growth by the increased number of artists at various levels of its royalty distribution system last year, compared to the streamer’s records from 2015. At the summit of this tiered analysis are the 80 top artists worldwide generating more than $10 million in annual royalties, compared to the lone artist earning that figure in 2015. 1,500 artists generated over $1 million last year, while more than 13,800 artists generated at least $100,000 – the latter nearly doubling the 7,800 artists creating $100,000 in streaming revenue from Spotify in 2015. Rounding out the assessment is the 100,000th highest-earning artist, who generated more than $7,300 in royalties last year, while the same position generated only $350 10 years ago.

Taken together, Spotify’s total royalty payouts amounted to a record $11 billion in 2025, bringing the platform’s lifetime payouts to $70 billion and representing roughly 70% of the company’s total annual earnings. “Today, Spotify accounts for roughly 30% of recorded music revenue,” Spotify’s Head of Music, Charlie Hellman, said in a post announcing the report. “Last year, our payouts grew by more than 10%, while other industry income sources grew by closer to 4%, making Spotify the primary driver of industry revenue growth in 2025.”

Spotify’s ever-expanding share within the music industry comes amid sustained criticism from musicians and songwriters over unsustainably low earnings on the platform. All of the company’s royalty data is qualified by the fact that it pays out those reported figures to right-holders, typically labels and music publishers, who then distribute the money across numerous contributors, including distributors, producers and more. According to a 2024 report from consulting firm MIDIA Research, streaming payouts are split with 30% going to Spotify, 56% to the recording side (labels, distributors and artists) and 14% to publishing contributors (publishers, performing rights organizations and songwriters). Songwriters, in turn, take 68% of that final slice, with songs attributed to multiple songwriters dividing the remains again.

While Spotify’s Loud & Clear report heralds a “widening path” through the data for its highest performing artists, recent criticism has centered the way that the pro-rata payment system used by most major streaming services – by which a platform’s subscription and ad revenue is pooled and distributed based on an artist’s share of total streams – disadvantages smaller artists with loyal followings.

Compared to other platforms using this proportional model, Spotify pays substantially less per stream on average, ranging from roughly $0.003 – $0.005; Apple Music, its closest competitor in market share, awards $0.006 – $0.007 per stream, while Tidal leads the industry with an average rate of $0.012 – $0.013 per stream. Other policies limiting earning opportunities for smaller artists include Spotify’s 2024 move to require tracks to reach 1,000 streams within a year to generate royalties, which demonetized as much as 86% of the music available on the platform.

To contextualize its current scale and function in the music industry, Spotify opened a blog post outlining its Loud & Clear report with a reflection on the industry’s state at its founding in 2006: “The music landscape was a world away from the one we know today. Piracy was rampant, revenue was shrinking, and, for most artists, the path to a global career was incredibly narrow. The question on everyone’s mind wasn’t about growth, but whether the industry could survive. It was at that moment that Spotify was founded, to help rebuild a broken system.”

Read Spotify’s full 2026 Loud & Clear report here.