"When I began to write this article, I thought it would be a quick one. Yes, I knew there was a lot of confusion and misinformation about Spotify royalties in the world, but I naively thought, no problem, I’ll just lay it all out in a quick couple of pages.
I could not have been more wrong.
The complexity of Spotify royalties is, frankly, insane. So insane that it took me over a month and 40 pages (before including diagrams) to explain it all. No artist, label, songwriter, distributor or musician should be required to have a depth of knowledge of this complexity to understand a very simple
question: “How much do I earn when my music streams on Spotify?”
There should be a simple, easy to understand answer.
But there’s not.
And to be blunt, it’s not really Spotify’s fault, nor is it the music industry’s fault, or the fault of U.S. Copyright laws. But when you put all three of these things together, you get a weird franken-monster royalty schema that has resulted from a new music business model built on consumers paying to have access to music, rather than paying to own it.
For each step described in the royalty calculation process, it took another step to explain the step preceding it, and the one preceding that one, and furthermore, the reasons why each step exists. Each step, in and of itself, makes sense, but together they are like peeling layer after layer of a never-ending onion."
https://vi.be/files/research/the-definitive-guide-to-spotify... [pdf]
To quote directly from the introduction:
"When I began to write this article, I thought it would be a quick one. Yes, I knew there was a lot of confusion and misinformation about Spotify royalties in the world, but I naively thought, no problem, I’ll just lay it all out in a quick couple of pages.
I could not have been more wrong.
The complexity of Spotify royalties is, frankly, insane. So insane that it took me over a month and 40 pages (before including diagrams) to explain it all. No artist, label, songwriter, distributor or musician should be required to have a depth of knowledge of this complexity to understand a very simple question: “How much do I earn when my music streams on Spotify?” There should be a simple, easy to understand answer. But there’s not.
And to be blunt, it’s not really Spotify’s fault, nor is it the music industry’s fault, or the fault of U.S. Copyright laws. But when you put all three of these things together, you get a weird franken-monster royalty schema that has resulted from a new music business model built on consumers paying to have access to music, rather than paying to own it.
For each step described in the royalty calculation process, it took another step to explain the step preceding it, and the one preceding that one, and furthermore, the reasons why each step exists. Each step, in and of itself, makes sense, but together they are like peeling layer after layer of a never-ending onion."