Spotify Just Dropped A Stat That Changes Everything...

<p>Welcome to the latest episode of Talking Trends, the weekly podcast from <a href='https://musicbusinessworldwide.com/'>Music Business Worldwide</a> (MBW) – where we go deep behind the headlines of news stories affecting the entertainment industry. Talking Trends is supported by <a href='http://www.volymusic.com/'>Voly Music.</a><br/><br/>This week on Talking Trends, MBW founder, Tim Ingham, responds to a new set of statistics released by Spotify about what artists earn from its platform.<br/><br/>Those stats, published on Spotify&apos;s Loud &amp; Clear site, reveal that <b>16,500 </b>artists generated over <b>$50,000</b> in royalties from Spotify in 2021.<br/><br/>But, Ingham argues, this wasn&apos;t the most revealing piece of data issued by Spotify. He focuses in on a number buried towards the bottom of the Loud &amp; Clear site: Spotify estimates that around <b>200,000 </b>artists on its platform are “professional or professionally aspiring”.<b><br/></b><br/>Spotify has partly estimated this figure, Ingham explains, via two key questions.<br/><br/>The first is: How many of the <b>8 million </b>artists on Spotify&apos;s platform have released fewer than 10 tracks? The answer might surprise you: it&apos;s<b> 5.4 million</b>, or just over two-thirds of artists on the service.<br/><br/>Spotify has then calculated how many of the<b> 2.6 million </b>artists on its platform <em>with</em> more than 10 tracks are popular enough to also have more than 10,000 monthly listeners.<br/><br/>The answer? Just <b>165,000 </b>acts.<br/><br/>Separately, Spotify has estimated that <b>199,000</b> artists sold a ticket to a live concert in 2019 (pre-pandemic) via the likes of Songkick, Ticketmaster and other platforms.<br/><br/>This is how Spotify gets to its estimate of <b>200,000</b> artists on its service that are “professional or professionally aspiring”.<br/><br/>Argues Ingham: &quot;To put it a slightly crueller way,<b> 98% </b>of the <b>8 million artists </b>on Spotify today either aren’t popular enough to have <b>10,000