Spotify streams in the top 200 list since 2018
Duncan Golicher
11/09/2021
Introduction
A previous analysis looked at inequity in revenue earned by artists from streaming music. https://rpubs.com/dgolicher/spotify It is interesting to see how things may have changed since 2019, particularly given the loss of live music during the lockdown period and the potential for further reduction to musicians income from live performances as a result of measures such as vaccine passports in some countries
It might be assumed that music streaming boomed during the lockdown period as a replacement for live performances. Is this the case?
It is impossible to scrape the total numbers of streams for all the music on spotify. The total number of tracks will have contiued to increase since 2018. Classic tracks from the past continue to make up a large share of the streams. In order to fulfill the mission of “unlocking the potential of human creativity – by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.” spotify needs to support new music. As shown in the previous analysis even successful bands making the transition from the truly independent scene struggle to gain enough revenue from spotify to even pay for the cost of recording. A few highly successful artists monopolise the top of the streaming charts. The data is available here https://spotifycharts.com/regional/us/weekly/. I scraped all the tables since 2018 for the global totals, the USA and Great Britain.
Total numbers of streams
Click on the tabs to see individual figures. Note that rolling averages can be used by altering the number in the roll period window in the bottom left corner and reloading. The figures are dynamic and interactive.
Global
USA
GB
Combined
The mouse can be used to select areas of the combined graph both along the horizontal and vertical axis.
Number of artists
This figure shows the number of unique artists in the top 200 per week. Some of the artist names refer to collaborations between artists that also are included so this is a slight over estimate.
Interpretation of the results
The total number of streams in the top 200 chart has increased slightly globally. This implies that there has been a small increase in the user base for spotify, probably mainly due to a growth in the Asian market. However the number of streams in the USA and the GB has remained static or even shown a slight decline. There is no visible positive impact on streams at the beginning of the lockdown period. If anything streaming declined when the more restrictive measures including stay at home orders were implemented. This may be because many people listen to spotify when commuting and/or working on tasks that are not distracted by background music. When at home they may have spent more lesure time time watching videos and playing computer games.
According to https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-lost-the-equivalent-of-2-2m-every-day-in-2020-as-it-spent-over-1bn-on-sales-and-marketing-for-the-first-time/ spotify has an annual operating cost of 2 billion and increased revenues and numbers of subscribers by around 17% in 2020. This is inline with the trend for global streams of the top 200 which suggests that revenues for smaller artists have remained more or less static, with spotify creaming off income into running costs such as marketing and “research and development”. How much direct marketing or new research and development is actually needed for an established platform is questionable. Spotify share prices have also trippled over the last year. So someone is making money from spotify. However it does not appear to be the musicians.
This is apparent to many other commentators on the subject, although the stats themsleves are not analysed in depth and are often simplified beyond recognition. For example
“In its Loud & Clear explainer, Spotify said that 90 per cent of the platform’s royalties are shared among the top 0.8 per cent of artists. However, according to a study conducted by Tim Ingham in Rolling Stone, Spotify paid roughly $5 billion in royalties – 90 per cent of which would be $4.5 billion.” This does not take into account the highly right skewed distribution even in the top 0.8%.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-creator-economy-spotify-patreon-1199388/
Popular music has always wrestled with a dilemma. To succeed as a popular musician the artist had to appeal to a large number of people. While this could be a clear recognition of quality and artistic ability (e.g. The Beatles) some popular artists have always been derivative and have relied on marketing hype for success, while clearly high quality, original, creative artists struggle to survive. The issue has now become critical, as not only the musicians themselves are affected but so too are smaller recording studios. There are no simple solutions to the problem, but the more the public are aware of it the more likely it is to be tackled. To their credit Spotify does make data available that can be used for independent analysis, but Spotify should not be allowed to control the narrative. This needs fixing if any form of music creation is to remain a viable career choice.
Top streaming artists
Percent to top streaming artist
The single most streamed artist accounted for around 20% of the streams in some weeks.
Table for all years (Global)
Table by year (Global)
Use the filter to look at individual artists and years.
Revenue against rank
Assuming that spotify still generates 0.00437 dollars per stream the revenue can be estimated. A total revenue of at least 100 thousand pounds (10^5) would be needed to provide an artist with an income comparable to a professional salary over the time period of the data from a single track. So only around 1500 attain this level, although total income will be higher as a result of the streaming of tracks that do not appear in the weekly top 200. This is still very far from the support for “millions of artists” in Spotify’s mission statement. This is before considering all the money that is needed to produce the music and market it. The relationship follows a more or less exponential decay, but the most successful artists lie above the regression line (on a log scale) and the least successful slightly below. So the drop off is even worse than might be expected. Note that the total number of streams for artists in the lower rankings is undercounted as their work is still streamed when it does not appear in the top 200 listing
Longevity of tracks in the global top 200
Again,the total number of streams for songs in the lower rankings is undercounted as the work is still streamed when it does not appear in the top 200 listing