Photo Credit: Spotify
How much of your Spotify subscription did your favorite artist earn this year? The Spotify Unwrapped website will let you know. Spoiler alert—it’s gonna be pennies unless you were a mega-listener.
This year’s Spotify Wrapped round-up has been criticized online for containing less information than years past. Complaints include the lack of categories with interesting data, such as ‘where listeners like you are from.’ Other missing data stats include no top genres, no location for music styles, and confusing subgenres like ‘Heist Xtra Raw’ and ‘Academic Hardstyle.’
“Not a fan of the ‘February was your Mallgoth Permanent Wave season, and June was your Coastal Grandmother Jam Band Psychadelic Rock Phase,’” another user complains. “Just give me my genres and not an AI generated label based on my genres.”
“Wrapped sucked ass this year. Spotify has the worst pay for artists, a sleazy ass of a CEO, and Wrapped sucks now. I will be switching to another service,” writes another complaint on reddit.
Let’s address that ‘worst pay for artists’ part leveled at Spotify with an easy-to-use calculator—now that Spotify is divulging stats as a marketing tactic. You can estimate how much you personally put into your favorite artists’ pocket with the Spotify Unwrapped calculator.
One caveat is that prices are in pounds (because the developer is from the UK) but choosing your level of Spotify Premium subscription and inputting data will showcase just how little artists make from your Spotify streams. Let’s take the screenshot above for example—it’s from a real Spotify Wrapped result where Burna Boy was the top artist listened to for the year.
“You’re a top 0.05% fan and you spent 5,593 minutes together,” Spotify Wrapped says. That qualifies for being a ‘superfan’ of the Afrobeats artist, so let’s check how much money Burna Boy pocketed from this superfan’s 232 streams of his latest album.
This person paid £143.88 ($182.82 USD) to Spotify for a yearly Spotify Premium subscription, while Spotify paid around £3.77 ($4.79 USD) to Burna Boy. Ouch. Exactly 2.62% of this person’s Spotify Premium subscription went to Burna Boy, despite the top 1% super-superfan status. If they purchased an album such as a vinyl, CD, or even a piece of merch from Burna Boy—he has earned more from that person than Spotify would ever pay.
Fully independent artists will receive around 90% of the reported return. Artists signed to record labels could receive anywhere from 5% to 50% of the money, depending on their record deal. While celebrating music online by sharing Spotify Wrapped stats is great advertising for Spotify—the stats highlight just how little the platform pays artists. And the reception this year has been less than stellar, with many people accusing Spotify’s layoffs of killing the excitement for a data-filled Spotify Wrapped.