The Weeknd may have nailed the first big streaming milestone of 2024 when ‘Blinding Lights’ became the first track to reach 4bn Spotify streams. But Taylor Swift has followed up with her own Big New Number: more than 1bn Spotify streams in the first 12 days of 2024.
Well, that’s according to various streaming data and charts accounts on social media, with the stat then picked up by Swifties (and British newspaper The Sun).
It rings true though: when Spotify launched its annual Wrapped campaign in late November 2023, Swift was its top artist with more than 26.1bn streams on its service in the year to date. That’s around 2.37bn streams a month, which (almost) neatly tracks to 1bn in 12 days.
Money maths time! According to law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips’ recently-launched streaming calculator, 1bn Spotify streams generates a payout to rightsholders of nearly $5.1m. That breaks down into $3.9m of sound-recording royalties; $597k of mechanical royalties and $571k of performance royalties.
(And if you want some even bigger-money maths, the 26.1bn streams of Swift’s music in the first 11 months of 2023 would, per the calculator, have generated around $132.1m of Spotify payouts.)
This is life at the superstar end of the streaming spectrum, in a world where according to research firm Luminate, just 10 artists had more than 1bn streams globally across all streaming services in 2023. Swift accounted for one in every 78 audio streams in the US that year, and 1.79% of the total US market.
It’s a reminder of the scale at the top end. Swift’s music is generating $5m of payouts every 12 days… and crucially that’s from just one streaming service. In the last update to its Loud & Clear stats website, Spotify estimated that it was responsible for more than 20% of global recorded music revenues.
“For a rough estimate, you can multiply the Spotify revenue by four to approximate how much artists generated from all recorded revenue sources,” it said then. $20m of payouts (if we factor in publishing) for Taylor Swift’s music in less than a fortnight? It’s possible.
The obligatory postscript: this doesn’t tell us anything about how streaming economics work for the artists lower down the pyramid.
That, remember, is a pyramid in which Luminate estimates that 45.6m tracks had precisely zero streams in 2023, while 152.2m (82.7% of the audio ISRCs tracked by the company) had fewer than 1,000 streams.
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