- Spotify's Billions Club playlist compiles every song with over 1 billion streams on the platform.
- So far, 167 songs have hit the benchmark, which equals around $3 million in streaming royalties.
- Spotify accounted for more than 20% of recorded music revenue in 2020, and many artists are asking for better payouts.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Olivia Rodrigo's hit single "Driver's License" is the newest addition to Spotify's Billions Club playlist, an initiative launched by the company "to celebrate the world's most listened to tracks and the artists behind them."
The playlist released in late May includes every song with over 1 billion streams on Spotify, a benchmark currently met by 167 songs. For context, more than 60,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day.
Spotify said members of the growing club receive a silver plaque that takes inspiration from the "iconic framed record" award given to artists when a song or album is certified platinum or gold.
The Billions Club serves as a who's-who of the highest-earning artists, featuring pop singers Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, and Post Malone, as well as Vance Joy, Bad Bunny, and Foster the People, among others.
-Olivia Rodrigo Philippines 🇵🇭 (@OliviaRodrigoPH) August 12, 2021
While some of the music industry's top players are breaking into the Billions Club, smaller artists are asking the streaming platform to raise its streaming royalties.
Streaming represents over half of global recorded music revenue, according to Spotify's "How the Money Flows" video explainer, and Spotify accounted for more than 20% of recorded music revenue in 2020, a company spokesperson told Insider.
Spotify, which has 155 million paying subscribers, generally pays between $.003 and $.005 per stream. Artists need about 326 streams to make $1, and 1 billion streams equals roughly $3 million in royalties.
The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, a group of more than 27,000 members of the music industry, are calling on Spotify to increase its royalty payment to at least a penny per stream.
In response to recent pressure, the Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek launched the company initiative Loud and Clear to "shed light on the complicated economics of music streaming."
According to the site, 13,400 rights holders are making over $50,000 a year - the median salary in the US - from Spotify streaming royalties. Rights holders who made more than $100,000 per year totaled 7,800, while 1,820 made more than $500,ooo per year, according to the site.
Competitor SoundCloud announced this March that the platform will pay artists royalties based on overall listening time through "fan-powered royalties" as opposed to the "pro-rata" system commonly used.
In April, Apple Music said its streaming royalties pay double what Spotify pays. Both platforms, though, calculate royalty rates on a streamshare basis, not a per-stream basis. As Spotify explains, it calculates "streamshare by adding up how many times music owned or controlled by a particular rights holder was streamed and dividing it by the total number of streams in that market."
-Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (@UMAW_) August 9, 2021
The World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialized agency within the UN, last month released a report investigating the economic and legal considerations facing artists in the digital music marketplace. The report included a comparison of streaming royalties across platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon, and more, and found "royalty payments are both unsustainable and out of balance compared to the value transferred to the streaming services."
A Spotify spokesperson told Insider the royalty pool paid to music rights holders from Spotify has grown by 50%, while the number of artists generating $10,000 or $50,000 has grown by more than 80% since 2017.
"That means the number of artists achieving these levels is growing significantly faster than the overall size of the royalty pool, which we think is great for the industry and is enabling even more artists to make a living from music," Spotify added.