It is no secret that Taylor Swift is popular, arguably the most in-demand female singer-songwriter. She receives over 100 million monthly listeners and almost 100 million followers, and is placed at number 2 in the world on Spotify. Currently, The Weeknd has taken the number 1 spot with more monthly listeners but fewer followers. Both Swift and The Weeknd get most of their monthly listeners from Jakarta, Indonesia.
Taylor Swift accounted for one in every 78 streams in the US last year. Her music sales amounted to that of a moderately-sized record label, nearly 2% of the album consumption of the entire music business. Americans spent more time listening to Swift than the entire Classical or Jazz genres. Many categories on Spotify are barely listened to at all. Out of 184 million tracks, more than 150 million received less than 1000 or fewer in 2023. 80 million received 10 or fewer streams, with 46 million netting zero streams.
Spotify and other streaming services pay billions of dollars a year in royalties to individual contracts between record labels, musicians, managers, and stakeholders. Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, wants to trim down the less popular offerings on music streaming services. These “merchants of garbage” clutter streaming platforms, offering no financial gain for platforms such as Spotify. This marks the first time in over a decade that the music-streaming model will be renovated.
As part of the new model, songs that are not streamed as much will be “demonetised”. Royalties will not be paid on songs that receive fewer than 1000 streams per year. Naturally, this garnered backlash – including from Amelia Fletcher, a competition professor and independent musician, who slammed the discriminatory and exploitative changes.
These changes will affect how much money each artist gets based on their streaming performance. A percentage of sales is paid out to music rightsholders, which is divided up between artists based on their share of total listening. Major labels and popular singers will benefit greatly from these changes, while start-up artists and smaller labels may suffer.
In October, Universal Music stated that it would introduce a “cost-saving programme” for 2024. Lay-offs are set to commence in the coming weeks, with a couple of hundred jobs expected to be globally axed. After an explosive comeback for the music industry, it appears that the streaming boom is slowing down.
Spotify estimates that the changes made will re-divert $1 billion of revenue towards the “emerging and professional” artists within the next 5 years.
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