Spotify paid out $40 billion in music royalties over 17 years
Spotify (Android, iOS) would have paid around $40 billion in royalties to artists since its inception in 2006. The data was presented this Wednesday, 8, during this year’s edition of StreamOn, the main event its for artists and content creators.
According to Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of Spotify, he said that currently the streaming service has 500 million users, 10 million artists and content creators in 184 countries.
As of the fourth quarter 2022 report, the company had 490 million active users.
Users and Artists
Card for mobile devices Showcase, a new way to present albums and artists to users (play: Spotify)
The company introduced a series of new products for artists, podcasters and a major update to its end-user application.
The Spotify app gains more immersive AI features, such as:
- Previews for podcasts, audiobooks and playlists;
- Autoplay podcasts;
- More accurate transient video feeds;
- Smart Shuffle to listen to songs that are closer to the user’s taste.
There’s also DJ AI, a casual music tool that has OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence on board, and which was launched at the end of February.
For artists, the main innovations are advertising and project distribution solutions, such as:
- Spotify Clips, with videos of up to 30 seconds on their profiles and album pages;
- Countdown pages, space for artists to provide information for users to read and save their albums and songs directly at the source;
- Marquee, sponsored album and song recommendation;
- Discovery Mode, a function that allows the artist to tag the song and the algorithm offers it to users to listen to;
- Showcase, mobile card containing the artist or an album in the user’s feed.
Updates coming from this Wednesday.
podcast
Netflix and Australia’s Schwartz Media have joined Spotify’s podcast platform, Spotify for Podcasters, which has integrated the Megaphone corporate publishing platform. The Swedish broadcaster announced new podcast tools such as video streaming, podcast preview, chapter podcast and interaction tools (Q&A and polls), as well as subscription programs, educational space for podcast creation and analytics. Most of these features were in testing with several publishers. He also confirmed new exclusive content, such as a new Batman audio series.
