Spotify’s own playlists are paying out $1m a day to the music business

May 19, 2016

Spotify has announced that its own playlists alone are now responsible for a billion streams every week – and revealed its top ten most popular brands.

There a number of interesting ways to slice this data, so here’s a few:

Spotify’s own artist site maintains that the company’s blended streams payout rate across free and premium is approximately $0.007. That means its playlists are now paying out somewhere around $7m a week to music rights-holders (with labels taking the lion’s share, of course). Handily enough, that works out at $1m a day – or $30m a month.
Last summer, Spotify’s engineering team tweeted that the platform was hosting ‘almost a billion streams every day’. You’d have to imagine the service has now comfortably surpassed this milestone. If so, it would mean that Spotify’s own playlists are responsible for around 14% of total music plays on its platform.
Simple maths: a billion playlist streams every week across Spotify’s estimated total 100m active user base works out at 10 plays per user per week. So the average Spotify user is actually streaming tracks from the service’s playlists somewhere between one and two times per day.

Impressive stuff, but playlist power can’t yet out-do superstar power: with 33.9m current active listeners on Spotify, Drake – the service’s biggest artist right now – is being played by over a third of Spotify’s 100m active users.

(How many of those fans discovered him via playlists, of course, is another matter…)

Spotify has also confirmed its ten most popular owned playlists, which you can check out below – led by Today’s Top Hits and Rap Caviar.

Stefan Blom, Chief Strategy and Content Officer at Spotify, said:

“We have thousands of these curated playlists within Browse, each of which is handmade around a specific mood, moment or genre.

“Some of these playlists – like Rap Caviar, Baila Reggaeton, Hot Country and Today’s Top Hits – have audiences in the millions that tune in to them every day on Spotify.

“Some of these playlists – like rap caviar, baila reggaeton, hot country and today’s top hits – have audiences in the millions that tune into them every day.”
Stefan Blom, Spotify

“We build these playlists through a combination of the best music experts around, lots of work hunting for great sounds, and a ‘feedback loop’ of real-time user data that tells us which tracks listeners are loving more, and which tracks they may be loving a little less.

“This lets us add tracks that are starting to explode, and switch out tracks that have been around for a while.

“What does this mean for our listeners? Spotify is filled with playlists that live, breathe and change, constantly updated by human curators using their own love of music in combination with listener data. The perfect marriage of man and machine.”