Your most-streamed artist might remind you of those weird couple of months you spent staring at the ceiling listening to Kate Bush. Your most-streamed track might make you reconsider your choice to put that Rae Sremmurd song on every playlist. With Year in Music, Spotify has unintentionally given users a tool for determining their monetary value as a fan — at least when it comes to streaming.

Major labels likely receive a sizable sum from Spotify, but not all of that money is going to artists. And not all artists get the same cut of Spotify revenue either: Other factors also come into play, like the country in which a song was streamed and the currency value in that country. My top artist of the year was Built to Spill, whose songs mostly from There's Nothing Wrong with Love I streamed times over the course of So the band is getting even less than that.

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I listened to 13, minutes of music on Spotify this year, which means I paid around one-tenth of a cent per minute. It's not just me either. Here's about how much some other Verge staffers paid their favorite artists technically, the rights holders this year.

Of course, we're just individual people with limited listening power. The most popular artists on Spotify are racking up millions of streams worldwide, which actually does translate into a lot of money. But even these massive numbers are paltry when you consider what fans might've spent if they had purchased a full album.

And in my small sample size of Verge staffers, most capped out at a few hundred streams per artist. Much has already been said about how little Spotify pays artists and how unsustainable the current streaming model is for artists. Unless this model changes, or labels take a smaller cut of the profits, the numbers will remain minuscule for smaller artists. But Year in Music makes that talking point clear on a personal level. It inadvertently gives users everything they need to figure out much of their money is going to the musicians that soundtracked most of their year.

Spotify's Year in Music shows just how little we pay artists for their music - The Verge

Still, I don't think any of us will cancel our Spotify subscriptions over this, so artist support will need to come in other forms.

I hear Built to Spill has some live shows coming up.

My Band Has 1,, Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties?

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