656 Unexpected Millionaires

“Loud & Clear,” Spotify’s annual drop of highly selective information presented as slides and released in the name of “transparency,” always tells a story. It’s just not necessarily the story Spotify thought they were telling.

This year, the narrative they are pushing might be called, “The Unexpected Millionaires.” That comes from an explanation they provide for this factoid:

Many of the artists who generated at least $1M on Spotify in 2023 aren’t household names and didn’t need a “hit” song to have a big year

80% of them didn’t have a song reach the Top 50 of Spotify’s Daily Global Songs chart

The Unexpected Millionaires

In the streaming era, the charts aren’t big enough to contain all of the artists finding success… You’d be surprised to see the artists who generated a million dollars on Spotify last year. Many aren’t household names and didn’t need a “hit” song to have a big year.

Of the 1,250+ artists who generated $1M+ from Spotify… over 1,000 of them didn’t have a single song that reached Spotify’s Global Top 50 all year.

This list is not just classic, generation-spanning artists. The majority of the artists generating $1M+ started their careers in 2010 or later.

What we are supposed to take from this, I gather, is that anyone can become a millionaire on Spotify – you don’t have to be a “household name” or have a “hit” or be a “classic,” like in old-fashioned versions of the music industry. So it could be you! Few have even heard of 80% of the people earning millions on Spotify. It feels like a lottery, in Spotify’s telling - this matches their longstanding narrative that they have eliminated all “gatekeepers.” Maybe next time it will be you, with $1M+ from streams? After all, someone’s got to win!

But who these winners are not is the exceedingly weird part of this. Spotify says that 80% of them didn’t crack the Top 50 Daily Global Chart – in absolute numbers, only 250 out of 1250 did. It’s pretty easy to guess who is among those 250. But who are the other 1,000?

Amateurs?

Not bloody likely. In fact, another part of Spotify’s “Loud & Clear” this year is dedicated to arguing that the vast majority of their rights holders are amateurs, and amateurs are not owed any money at all. Here’s the slide about that, which they call “Numbers in Context”:

On Spotify in 2023

10M+ uploaders had at least a single track

~8M had less than 10 tracks all time

~5M+ had less than 100 total streams across their full catalog

Numbers in Context

More artists are succeeding and, as a result, even more are interested in becoming artists. Sure, more than 10 million uploaders have at least a single track on Spotify, but when it comes to building financial opportunities, we’re focused on those most dependent on streaming as part of their livelihood…

As a point of comparison, FIFA estimated there are hundreds of millions of people who self-identify as “footballers,” but 128,694 people are actually getting paid any amount of money from it. While music and sports are quite different, this demonstrates how widespread the aspiration is to participate in creative and athletic pursuits and make a living from them.

Another way to think about it: The 10+ million uploaders on Spotify are comparable to the tens of millions who have uploaded at least a single video to YouTube, often just to share something they enjoy with the world. The number of creators trying to build a career as a video creator is much smaller.

Unsurprisingly, this glib comparison of recording artists to someone who takes a soccer ball to the park on weekends, or occasionally posts a random video on YouTube, angered a lot of actual working musicians. I shared this part of “Loud & Clear” on social media and the responses were intense.

But how to put these two pieces of Spotify’s narrative together? One says you don’t need a hit to make a mint on the platform; indeed, 80% of global top hits on the platform don’t even rank among top earners. The other says, if you’re not already earning big on the platform you’re just a hobbyist.

So who is earning big on Spotify?

Outside the “Loud & Clear” power point, a piece of information surfaced this week that provides an answer – or possibly 656 of them. The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an exposé – “initiated following a tip from anonymous informants” – that a single Swedish composer, Johan Röhr, has amassed 15 billion streams on Spotify under at least 656 different artist pseudonyms. This makes Johan Röhr a more streamed artist than even Abba, notes Dagens Nyheter.

Johan Röhr’s tracks are all released by a Swedish company that has previously surfaced as having strong ties to Spotify, called Epidemic Sound. And his pseudonymous tracks populate over 144 official Spotify playlists, with a collective 62 million followers. These aren’t playlists put together by listeners, these are ones put together by the company. On eleven of these playlists, this one artist turns out to be responsible for 20% or more of the tracks – on some he accounts for more than 40% of the tracks, albeit always under many, many different names. And the success rate for music submitted to the platform by Johan Röhr is staggering: 80% of his uploaded tracks appear on these official Spotify playlists.

Johan Röhr declined an interview with Dagens Nyheter, as did Epidemic Sound, as did Spotify. The details of their business relationships remain anything but transparent. Here are just a few of Johan Röhr’s names - the full list, published by Dagens Nyheter, is far too long to fit this newsletter.

Spotify wants to tell us that streaming is an open field. But is Johan Röhr 656 of the 1,000 global artists who aren’t household names, yet make a million a year from Spotify…?

Still, that leaves 344 spots for the rest of us to aim at. Or maybe there’s another Johan Röhr out there, already accounting for those.

Listening to: Something in the Room She Moves, by Julia Holter

Cooking: Bulghur with vermicelli