This year's Spotify Wrapped launched on Wednesday. While Weird Al's Wrapped video message to fans joked that he'd made enough money from 80 million streams on the service to buy a sandwich, a new report from Billboard reveals how lucrative Spotify has been for the service's top-streamed artist. Swift's royalties from Spotify are estimated to come to $101 million in 2023.
At 26.1 billion streams, her recorded music royalties amount to $97 million, according to the publication's royalty calculator. With the rest of December still ahead, she's estimated to make $101 million by the end of the year, and with publishing revenue added, $131 million from the app alone. Swift, who pulled her music from Spotify for a few years beginning in 2014, had more streams in 2023 than any single artist in a year. Following her in the Top 5 are Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, Drake, and Peso Pluma.
Spotify recently announced a restructuring of its royalty system that “will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool.” It's supposed to addresses issues with artificial streaming, songs with fewer than 1,000 streams, and tracks that are just white noise.
On Nov. 21, Spotify shared a new blog post, clarifying, “While each of these issues only impacts a small percentage of total streams, addressing them now means that we can drive approximately an additional $1 billion in revenue toward emerging and professional artists over the next five years.”
