Spotify announced Wednesday that the company now accounts for roughly one-third of the music industry’s recorded music revenue, further cementing its position as the world’s largest music streaming service.
The company emphasized that it made the largest single-year payout to the music industry by any retailer ever, with revenue having doubled since 2017.
“Today, Spotify accounts for roughly 30% of recorded music revenue,” Head of Music Charlie Hellman said. “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.”
He noted that Spotify has paid out more than $11 billion to the music industry, the largest annual payment ever from any retailer, bringing the company’s total payouts to nearly $70 billion.
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The platform’s historic milestone has allowed more artists to earn six figures annually from Spotify alone. Independent artists and labels specifically accounted for half of all royalties.
In the announcement, Hellman also listed new focus areas and products to expect, including efforts to increase discoverability amid a saturated market, combat artificial intelligence exploitation against artists and generate ticket sales for live performances.
“Our number one priority is to help more new music and new artists cut through the noise and form real connections with fans,” Hellman said.
“With over 100,000 new songs released daily, competing against the entire history of recorded music, emerging artists face an unprecedented challenge in building the early fanbase every successful career needs,” he added.
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To protect artists’ identities amid a surge in AI-generated content, Spotify said it is planning to update its verification and song credit systems.
“AI is being exploited by bad actors to flood streaming services with low-quality slop to game the system and attempt to divert royalties away from authentic artists,” Hellman said. “So we’re going to introduce changes to the systems for artist verification, song credits, and protecting artist identity.”
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In addition, the music platform will launch SongDNA to let fans see who worked on a song; roll out new tools to help convert listeners into ticket buyers; and introduce human music editors to balance algorithmic playlist recommendations.
