Spotify updated its annual loud and clear report on Wednesday, touting figures the streaming service says reflects an increasingly global music industry as creators from all over the world are spawning more hits.
In the report, Spotify said artists from 75 different countries had generated at least $500,000 in streaming royalties last year, compared to 66 the year prior, with about half of an average artist’s streams now coming from outside their home country.
“It’s been exciting to watch the business transform over the last 20 years and help music become less centralized,” Joe Hadley, Spotify’s global head of music partnerships and audience, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “There’s the superstars here, but also the emerging artists and the layer up that can earn a living, and there’s also the globalization of music that has happened alongside it.”
Also reflecting the widening number of global genres reaching critical mass, Spotify said songs in 16 different languages reached the platform’s Global Top 50 chart, double the number of languages on the chart back in 2020. Brazilian funk was the fastest-growing genre to make at least $100 million on the platform last year, followed by K-Pop.
Music is more global than ever,” Hadley says. “We had Bad Bunny, an independent, Spanish-language artist performing at the Super Bowl. K-Pop is no longer niche. Afrobeat is global music, Mexicana is exploding. Brazilian funk is one of the fastest growing genres on Spotify. 20 years ago, that would have been really hard to imagine. I think the takeaway here is that music has become increasingly borderless.”
While Spotify’s Loud and Clear report often shares stats reflecting the changing nature of music consumption on the platform, at its core, Spotify started the initiative in 2021 as an effort to clear up misconceptions about the streaming economy and give music creators more transparency about how the streaming service pays out. Low pay for streams has been many musicians’ biggest critique toward Spotify for years, and while the new data Spotify released likely won’t dispel those concerns, it does suggest more artists are finding audiences.
Spotify’s payouts to the industry surpassed $11 billion in 2025, a $1 billion increase from the year prior, and the number of artists who made at least $100,000 last year increased by 1,400 to a total of 13,800. Meanwhile, Spotify reported that a third of artists who made at least $10,000 last year were DIY or at least started off DIY. Still given that millions of songs on the platform don’t get a single stream — let alone the 1,000 required to actually get paid out at all — the business still reflects a system where very few break artists break through, even if the number is growing.
“Building a career in music has never been easy,” Hadley says. “One thing we always go back to is that nearly 70 percent of our music revenue goes back to the industry. In other words, our incentives are aligned. When the artists grow, we grow, and we grow when they earn more. What we’re seeing in the data is that more and more artists are earning meaningful income than before.”
Beyond recording, Spotify said Tuesday that last year represented the largest annual music publishing payout in Spotify’s history,” a notable claim given the feud the streaming service got into with music publishers in 2024 over its move to cut royalties to songwriters based on a controversial bundling strategy. Spotify didn’t disclose how much the company paid to music publishers last year but said it’s paid out $5 billion over the past two years.
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