Spotify has announced that all songs on the platform must reach at least 1,000 streams to be eligible for royalties. This announcement follows lengthy speculation about potential changes to the streaming service’s policies. There were already speculations about a possible difficulty for artists to receive royalties for their music.
The adjustments were made in one Spotify blog post presented. This explained guidelines aimed at regulating the amount of content on the platform and minimizing fraud risks. The key measure is to introduce a payment threshold from 2024 requiring songs to reach at least 1,000 streams to generate royalties.
Criticism from artists
According to Spotify data, there are about 100 million songs available on the platform, but only about 37.5 million meet the new requirements to generate revenue. About 60 percent of songs do not meet the new threshold, although Spotify emphasizes that these songs represent less than one percent of the streaming service’s total.
Artists, including the indie duo Damon and Naomi, have Criticism of the new regulations was expressed and noted that this could have a negative impact on emerging talent. In one Blog post They say: “This amounts to a regressive tax, cutting payments to those who already receive less in order to increase payments to those who already receive more, thereby widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. At first glance, this is the ugliest of all ugly capitalist money grabs.”
Necessity of innovations
Spotify defends the new policies, saying the affected songs only earn about three cents per month on average. In addition, the streaming service highlights that although the small payments may seem small, they amount to a total of approximately 36,679,800 euros that could be distributed to those who meet the requirements.
In addition to increasing payouts for more successful songs, the measures are also intended to combat fraud, as some users upload a large number of tracks and receive a portion of the royalties for each of them.