Spotify announced that it will stop paying royalties for songs with fewer than a thousand views per year in early 2024with the aim of preventing the loss of the small payments these songs generate and using them to “support artists who rely on income from the streaming”.

The music platform has shared its intention to modernize its royalty system with the aim of generating “an additional billion dollars” for emerging and professional artists.

Spotify royalties are a payment system aimed at the artists and composers of the songs published on the platform. In this way, when a song meets the necessary conditions, rights holders receive royalties for the reproductions of that song. Europe Press.

To calculate these royalties, the company distributes net revenue from premium subscription fees and advertising to rights holders on a monthly basis. Likewise, the net income paid to each owner or artist is determined by the number of reproductions of their published songs.

However, as Spotify explained in a statement on its blog: This royalty system causes loss of small payments for songs that do not reach a thousand reproductions per year. and causing a total loss of $40 million per year.

This is due to the 100 million songs on Spotify, tens of millions of which are only played between one and a thousand times a year. On average, each of these themes generates a small payment of $0.03 per month.

However, this money is ultimately lost because it is not large enough to pay the fees charged by record labels and distributors, nor to pay for the transactions with banks.

That is why the company has indicated that this money, which usually goes unreached and forgotten by artists, and which totals as much as $40 million per year, can be used for “increasing payments to artists most dependent on their income”.

For example, Spotify has announced that from 2024 it will stop paying for songs that do not reach at least a thousand views per year, and with the money saved from these payments will offer more compensation to the rest of the artists and owners. (JO)