Taylor Swift Will Reportedly Make $100M From Spotify Streams This Year
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.”