The music industry is abuzz with speculation about Spotify’s plans to change its payouts model.
Now there are some new details: the claim that from early next year its ‘minimum annual threshold’ for tracks before they start generating royalties will be 1,000 streams.
Stem president Kristin Graziani spilled the beans in a post for Consequence last week. “All tracks will have to reach a minimum streaming threshold of 1000 streams within 12 months in order to be paid a royalty,” she wrote.
MBW and Billboard have since followed up to confirm the figure with industry sources. The latter drew on stats from Spotify’s own ‘Loud & Clear’ website to note that since 37.5m tracks have been streamed more than 1,000 times ever on Spotify.
With a 100m-track catalogue, that means around 62.5m tracks (so 62.5% of its music) hasn’t met the minimum threshold in all-time streams, let alone annual ones.
MBW added that the music being demonetised on average earns “less than five cents a month” per track under the existing model.
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