• Spotify paid South African musicians R400 million in royalties in 2024.
• This represents 0.21 percent of the $10 billion Spotify paid to artists globally in 2024.
• Despite the low pay out, South African music generates 600 000 hours of streaming per day.

On a dreary Thursday morning in Johannesburg, Spotify hosted its Loud & Clear event. This event is meant to give locals in the music industry an idea of how well the music industry performs on the streaming platform and to put it bluntly, it’s not looking good.

We’ll dive into the numbers Spotify shared in just a bit but we want to talk about the most important number the platform shared, how much money was paid out to artists in royalties in 2024.

Local artists reportedly generated nearly R400 million in royalties in 2024, double what the industry made in 2022. That looks impressive at first blush but really, it’s a miniscule payment.

For context, in January Spotify bragged that it had paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, South African artists received 0.21 percent of that pay out. Granted, South Africa is a small market compared to the likes of the US. Or is it?

The local team at Spotify reports that globally, 220 million playlists feature at least one local artist and streams of local artists rack up 600 000 hours of listening everyday from users.

“A substantial portion of royalties generated by South African artists came from international listeners,” the platform reports.

This highlights that South African music is becoming more popular overseas, especially in Germany and Colombia. However, Spotify remains among the worst ways to earn money as an artist.

The platform is rather secretive about how much it pay per rotation of a track but estimates peg the amount at $0.04 per 10 streams of a song at the top end. That means that in order to earn $4, an artist needs roughly 1 000 streams of a song per month. Sound Campaign reckons a musician needs roughly 300 000 streams a month to earn “a decent wage”.

To put this into perspective, Bandcamp, an online music store, pays artists and average of 82 percent of the revenue it earns selling albums online. Of course, Bandcamp isn’t a streaming platform in the traditional sense and users need to buy music to access it. However, if you truly want to support artists, it’s best to buy music from them directly or through platforms such as Bandcamp.

Spotify likes to paint itself as a champion of musicians everywhere but looking at the numbers, artists are still very much starving if they rely on Spotify alone.

In fact, it may be more lucrative to launch your music on TikTok as you’re likely to reach a wider audience. In February it was reported that 84 percent of songs that entered the Billboard Global 200, went viral on TikTok first. There are countless stories of TikTok creators who made a song that went viral, launching them into a lucrative music career.

Local artists may be more popular among Spotify listeners but receiving 0.21 percent of the global pay out for billions of streams just doesn’t feel like a good headline. Especially when you consider that Spotify paid Joe Rogan $250 million for his podcast.