{"id":2068,"slug":"spotify-loud-and-clear-tiers-2025","title":"Spotify royalty earnings tiers, self-reported, 2025 vs 2015","source":"Spotify newsroom, Loud & Clear 2026 report covering calendar year 2025, published 11 March 2026","source_url":"https:\/\/newsroom.spotify.com\/2026-03-11\/loud-and-clear-music-economics-highlights\/","source_type":"official","method":"Figures as stated by Spotify in its own Loud & Clear royalty-transparency report, not independently audited by Afrobeats Wire. Spotify reports these as counts of recording artists whose catalogues generated at least the stated threshold_usd in a full calendar year, plus the royalties earned by the artist ranked 100,000th by earnings that year (rank_number). prior_year_increase is Spotify's own stated year-over-year change for the $100,000 tier ('nearly 1,400 more than the prior year'), not a figure Afrobeats Wire computed. total_industry_royalties_usd_2025 and lifetime_industry_royalties_usd are Spotify's own headline totals, paid to all rightsholders combined (recording and publishing), not to any single artist. Spotify does not publish a per-stream rate anywhere in this report; these are earnings tiers, not stream counts, and a given tier can be reached with very different stream totals depending on listener market and premium-versus-ad-supported mix.","unit":"artist_count_or_usd","license":"Afrobeats Wire's compilation and analysis are licensed CC BY 4.0. Rights in the underlying source data remain with the source named above.","confidence":"high","retrieved":"2026-08-21 10:46:19","n":8,"first_party":0,"columns":[{"key":"metric","label":"Metric","type":"text"},{"key":"year","label":"Year","type":"number"},{"key":"value","label":"Value","type":"number"},{"key":"value_type","label":"Value Type","type":"text"},{"key":"threshold_usd","label":"Threshold Usd","type":"number"}],"rows":[{"metric":"Artists earning $10,000,000 or more","year":2025,"value":80,"value_type":"artist_count","threshold_usd":10000000},{"metric":"Artists earning $10,000,000 or more","year":2015,"value":1,"value_type":"artist_count","threshold_usd":10000000},{"metric":"Artists earning $1,000,000 or more","year":2025,"value":1500,"value_type":"artist_count","threshold_usd":1000000},{"metric":"Artists earning $100,000 or more","year":2025,"value":13800,"value_type":"artist_count","threshold_usd":100000,"prior_year_increase":1400},{"metric":"Royalties earned by the artist ranked 100,000th","year":2025,"value":7300,"value_type":"usd","rank_number":100000},{"metric":"Royalties earned by the artist ranked 100,000th","year":2015,"value":350,"value_type":"usd","rank_number":100000},{"metric":"Total royalties paid to the music industry that year","year":2025,"value":11000000000,"value_type":"usd"},{"metric":"Lifetime royalties paid since Spotify's founding","year":2026,"value":70000000000,"value_type":"usd"}]}