“But now we can move that on, and ask what percentage of genuinely ‘professional or professionally aspiring’ artists – that club of 200,000 – are generating more than $50,000 a year on Spotify. As a standalone stat, 0.2% sounds like a scandal.

He adds: “Spotify’s own stats show that just 0.2% of artists on its platform are generating $50,000 or above per year. This is how Spotify gets to its estimate of 200,000 artists on its service that are “professional or professionally aspiring”.Īrgues Ingham on MBW’s Talking Trends podcast: “To put it a slightly crueller way, 98% of the 8 million artists on Spotify today either aren’t popular enough to have 10,000 monthly listeners, or have released than 10 tracks to date.”

Separately, Spotify has estimated that 199,000 artists sold a ticket to a live concert in 2019 (pre-pandemic) via the likes of Songkick, Ticketmaster and other platforms. Spotify has then calculated how many of the 2.6 million artists on its platform with more than 10 tracks are popular enough to also have more than 10,000 monthly listeners. The answer might surprise you: it’s 5.4 million, or just over two-thirds of artists on the service.

The first: How many of the 8 million artists on Spotify’s platform have released fewer than 10 tracks to date? Spotify has partly estimated this “professional artist” figure, Ingham explains, via two key questions.

Spotify for artist stats