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Spotify Wrapped For Artists 2020 Includes New Insights

Spotify Wrapped For Artists 2020

Spotify’s viral Wrapped feature, which shares performance data for the year, gives artists more insights into their audience.

It’s December once again, which means Spotify users worldwide are beginning to share their Wrapped stats. The Wrapped feature helps listeners understand their behavior platform, and it allows artists to understand how their music performs. It’s a unique piece of marketing that has helped set the streaming giant apart from its competition, and starting today, December 2, 2020, Wrapped features are available to everyone.

Last year, we ran an article on ways Spotify could improve Wrapped for Artists. We highlighted that the data provided didn’t have much value for musicians, even if it is fun to look at. Wrapped 2020 took our advice and now features additional information on user behavior, including a list of users who frequently share an artist’s music.

An example of Wrapped’s new insights for artists

A message posted to the Spotify blog regarding the release of Wrapped For Artists 2020 reads:

As an all too eventful 2020 winds down, it’s only right to take a moment to reflect on this extraordinary and challenging year as well as the strides you’ve made in the midst of it all.

When we talk about 2020 in the years to come, we’ll, of course, tell a story of a pandemic, protests, and politics — but it will also be a story of resilience and the persistence of human connection. With the year coming to a close, it’s time to celebrate the essential bond between artists and fans with Wrapped.

Starting today, artists and their teams can access their 2020 Artist Wrapped, a personalized summary of your year on Spotify that will tell you how your music connected with fans around the world. To access Wrapped, all you have to do is log in to your Spotify for Artists page on the web or mobile. If you haven’t claimed your account, don’t worry, you can do that here and then check out your Wrapped after. As long as you’ve had more than three listeners before October 31st, there’s a Wrapped experience waiting for you at Spotify for Artists.

What are you waiting for? Head over to Spotify for Artists and review your 2020 stats!

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How Many Spotify Streams Do You Need To Live Above The Poverty Line?

Spotify streaming royalties often upset artists, but how many plays does a musician need to live above the poverty line? We did the math.

The streaming wars are raging on. Spotify has more than one hundred million monthly subscribers worldwide, which places the platform far ahead of its peers, but Apple Music and Amazon Music are gaining millions of new users with each passing month. Whether or not the global economy can sustain the numerous streaming platforms won’t be decided for some time, but whether or not artists can survive the streaming economy is a hot topic that needs to be addressed.

Any industry expert will tell you that musicians today have it easy. There are more avenues for exposure than ever, recording music is (or can be) cheap, and an increasing number of artists are finding success outside the traditional label system. It is theoretically possible for anyone with access to a laptop and the ability to convey a melody to become a digital sensation who has fans all over the world without the aid of big label money (though, to be fair, big label money still makes a sizable difference).

Streaming payouts are a relatively new revenue stream for musicians. No one is suggesting artists survive on streaming royalties alone. Still, with physical media sales bottoming out and competition for tour revenue increasing, the money made from streaming can have a significant impact on an artist’s ability to develop, not to mention sustain themselves.

Still, every other week someone goes viral online and builds an entire career of the profits made from streaming royalties. The majority of these overnight sensations are young and without families to support, but they still have the cost of living expenses that need to be met. That got us to thinking: How many streams does it take to survive on streaming revenue alone?

According to the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), the poverty line for single-person households is $11,770. If we ignore how that figure would be hard for anyone to live on in a major city (and most mid-size cities), then we can round up to $12,000 and use streaming revenue calculators to figure out how many Spotify streams someone would need to sustain themselves.

At an average payout of $0.006 per song stream, a musician living in the United States needs 3,000,000 plays annually to have a gross income of $12,000. 

Of course, if the artist has a label deal the record company would get paid before the artist. Depending on the amount owed to the label, the artist may need millions of addition plays to see the same amount of income themselves.

But what about people with families? The ASPE puts the poverty line for a family of four (2 adults, 2 children) at $24,250. Using the same average royalty rate, a musician would need 6,062,500 Spotify streams to earn that amount of gross income.

These numbers get much bigger when the musician is part of a larger group. If a band has four members and all four have families where they were the sole source of income, the group would need to generate 24,250,000 Spotify streams to gross enough so each member’s family would be at or above the poverty line.

Again, no one is saying an artist should survive on streaming royalties alone. Some will be able to make it work, especially if they have a large following and low overhead, but most will need to create as many revenue streams as possible to survive. The key to a long career in music today is through the development of a community around an artist and their work that promotes purchasing merch, physical media, and concert tickets. That has always been true, and likely won’t change anytime soon.

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Artists Share The Sad Truth Behind Spotify’s Wrapped Feature

Spotify’s end of year feature creates a lot of conversation around music, but artists are speaking out about the reality of streaming service success.

With December well underway, Spotify Wrapped is once again the talk of the music industry. Spotify’s annual end of year roundup feature generates a lot of interesting data points that fans can use to share their musical taste and that artists use to promote their rising profile. However, there are some critical data points left out of Wrapped that many artists believe need far more attention. Specifically, how much money musicians make from the streaming giant.

One-million of anything seems like a lot. One-million houses would virtually end the homelessness problem in the United States. One-million slices of pizza could feed you and everyone you know for months, if not years. One-million dollars is considered a life-changing amount of money.

One-million plays, however, are not so impressive when you consider the amount of money earned from that level of engagement.

After sharing their end of the year stats that boasted over 1.1 million plays of their catalog on Spotify with fans, pop-rock group You, Me, And Everyone We Know shed some light on the reality of streaming success. The group’s frontman, Ben Liebsch, wrote:

“1.1 Million plays = $7,700 in gross revenue. That’s before labels and producers get their cut. Then you have to try to pay for another recording. Why do artists get paid last? Musicians deserve a better cut.”

He added, “Grateful for the listeners, but artists are getting hosed.”

https://twitter.com/youmeband/status/1202691545645932545

Another band, Dowsing, shared a similar message with their Spotify Wrapped statistics. The band wrote, “We are thankful for your streams. Buy the physical medium to support art. Buy directly from your favorite band’s label. There is no better way to help them climb out of artistic debt.  When bands work with the right label and have less financial stress they can succeed.”

When retweeting Dowsing’s message, the band Dikembe added a little math to help fans understand the reality of the situation. 

“Did you know you would have to stream our songs approx 3,000 times for us to make the same amount of $$ as we would selling a record,” they tweeted. “So please listen to our records 3,000 times in a row.”

Elsewhere, Torres summarized the situation by writing, “Your favorite musician has $90 to their name and a billion Spotify plays.”

https://twitter.com/torreslovesyou/status/1202616588165419009

Artists aren’t the only ones aware of the problem with streaming. Countless music fans have tweeted jokes referencing the amount of money they helped an artist earn after listening to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours of content. 

Calculating streaming revenue, especially from Spotify, can be tricky. There is no fixed amount earned per song stream. Instead, earnings from streams are based on the total numbers of streams an artist had in relation to all the streams on the platform. For example, if there were 10 song streams on a day when Spotify had just 100 total streams would earn far more than 10 song streams on a day when Spotify had over 100,000,000 streams. Every artist is, in a way, competing against one another for fractions of pennies, while Spotify earns more as the total amount of plays continues to rise as the Spotify community continues to grow.

Dan Ozzi, former head of Noisey, posted an update to his popular Reply Alt newsletter this week where he asked several musicians how people can support their favorite artists without necessarily buying stuff. Head over here to read what he learned. 

Spotify has not commented on any outcry related to the Wrapped discussion, nor do we expect them to anytime soon. Change it seems, at least for right now, is unlikely. Artists will need to work together to force a conversation about streaming royalty fairness before any giant corporation budges on the current terms of their agreements.

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