That's A Wrap

The year in stolen music.

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Ah yes, it’s that time of the year again. The weather turns colder, we take time from our schedules to get together with friends and family, and of course, we celebrate the music that we stole this year and tell the world all about it with Spotify Wrapped!

I’ll be the asshole who reminds you that all those sweet tunes you played this year generated fuck all in monies for the artists you love. Sure, I know you buy t-shirts from all of the bands that you listen to, and you buy vinyl, and you go would love to some shows but the kids are so busy with school and it’s hard to make time, y’know?

I know, slugger, it’s hard out there to find your Dad Rock dreams.

Yes, I am going to filet Spotify and their year-end extravaganza of bullshit, but you, dear Spotify user, are not my target today. Although, I do hope that you’ll see from your own stats just how shitty the system really is.

The above image is my wife’s Spotify Wrapped for 2023. For our purposes here, it doesn't matter to me what she listened to, but how much she listened to.

According to Spotify’s own stats, which are very hard for you to view on your own with any degree of transparency, Kimmy listened to 6,482 minutes of music. Spotify is the exclusive way that my wife actively listens to music. So, it’s fair to say that if she listened to music that she chose to listen to in 2023, it was via Spotify.

Based on the data Spotify gave Kimmy for her 2023 Spotify Wrapped “celebration”, we can not only tell how many songs she listened to, but we can also figure out just how much of her subscription fees actually went to pay the artists that she is listening to.

The average song length on Spotify in 2023 is 3:17. Let’s use that as our average timestamp for Kimmy’s chosen jams. If we take her total listening time of 6,482 minutes and divide that by the average song length of 3:17, you end up with something around 1994 total songs for the year that she played.

For easy math, let’s just call it 2000 songs. I’ll give Spotify a few songs of cushion here just because I am a swell guy.

Spotify pays an artist just $.0003 per stream of a song. Yeah, just three tenths of one cent. To qualify for payment, a song must be played for more than thirty seconds. Spotify also uses this same thirty second rule when compiling Spotify Wrapped data. So, we know that artists were being paid for all of Kimmy’s Wrapped songs. The question now is how much of what she paid to Spotify went back to the artists.

2000 songs x $.003 = $6.00

Yep, for an entire year of listening, Spotify paid ALL of the artists that Kimmy listened to in 2023 just six measly dollars.

In turn, Kimmy paid Spotify $16.95 a month for a Spotify family plan. So, Kimmy’s annual payout to Spotify looks like this:

$16.95/month x 12 months = $203.40

$203.40 - Annual streaming costs
$6.00 - Paid to artists
$197.40 - Paid to Spotify

After spending more than $200 this year on music, less than 3% of what Kimmy paid to Spotify actually went back to the artists that she loves. It’s nothing short of criminal. Off the backs of just one family, Spotify pocketed nearly $200 in profits after paying paltry royalties to the artists that drive their app. It is easy to see why Spotify posted a $68 Million profit in the third quarter of 2023 alone.

At present, Kimmy, and our daughter Hannah are the two family members using that plan. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that all four members of my family were using Spotify as our primary mode of listening and we all listened at the same rate that Kimmy does. That would make our numbers look something like this for our family of four.

8000 songs x $0.003 = $24.00

$203.40 - Annual Streaming Costs
$24.00 - Paid to artists
$179.40 - Paid to Spotify

As you can see, even with a family of four, the lions share of the subscriptions fees collected by Spotify never make it back to the artists making the music.

After looking at the numbers for a single user and a family of four, I began to wonder just how much music would a family need to listen to for Spotify to lose money. The answer, is a fuck ton of it.

$16.95/month ÷ $0.003/song = 5,650 Songs

For a user or family to put Spotify at break even status would require 5,650 plays per month. Spotify’s family plan will allow you to add up to a total of six separate users. Even with six different users on a plan, it would mean each user spinning more than 940 songs per month to add up to the $16.95 being paid to Spotify each month.

While I will not bore you with more math, 940 songs at Spotify’s average length adds up to roughly 51 hours of music per month, for each of the six users. You, and I and Spotify all know that no one is listening to that much music.

You might be sitting there, dear reader, and thinking, “I listen to 50 hours of music a month!” Maybe you do, but I sincerely doubt it unless it’s a part of your job or you’re an OTR driver. And even if you did, your family is not listening to a collective 300 hours a month. It’s obvious that Spotify is going to come out the victor here and artists will continue to lose.

The next question if your family does listen to 300 hours of music is why you think you should be able to consume that much art for so little money, but that’s a question for a different day.

I loathe being the sad sack who shits on people celebrating what they’ve listened to this year. Music should be a celebration and we should want to share it. But sharing it from a platform that exploits artists and its own users ruins the experience and its ruining music.

Spotify is killing music as we know it and that is not an exaggeration. As artists are paid less and less, our concerts become more expensive, the quality of the work drops, seemingly successful musicians are forced to leave the industry or only work at their craft part time. As such our culture shrivels inward ever so slightly.

Share you stats. Tell the world about your Wrapped 2023. But know what you are sharing, and more importantly what you are paying, and what you are NOT paying for. Your dollars spent on Spotify help to propagate a culture where music is valueless and technology is king.

In 2024 when you begin tell me about what music you listened to, perhaps you would be better off to tell me about the music you invested in.

Cheers,
Matty C