🟢📣 Louder & Clearer 2026: The Full Report

Posterity edition

Hello and welcome to the complete edition of Infinite Catalog’s Louder & Clearer 2026!

This report uses Spotify’s own Loud & Clear data to unspin their PR-friendly takeaways and provide a data-driven account of what’s really going on with the world’s largest music retailer. The main takeaways this year:

• Per-artist income is shrinking year over year, -3.7% since 2022

• Mid-tier artist income is eroding the most, with the $100K+ tier seeing the biggest losses

• Upward mobility is faltering, with a new glass ceiling at the $1M+ tier

• $1.2B has shifted from working- and mid-tier artists to the $2M+ tiers since 2022, with fewer than 80 artists capturing 81% of that shift

• One bright spot: poolshare improved for some working- and mid-tiers from 2024 -> 2025, likely due to more action being taken on streaming fraud

Originally published in three parts, this post brings it all under one roof. I’m not sending this out since subscribers already got these installments, but if you’re here for the first time, go ahead and subscribe for future music industry deep dives.

With that, here we go.

The data and the spreadsheet

In 2024, I noticed Spotify’s annual Loud & Clear reports include what they call “Payouts” data (more accurately, the number of recording artists across different royalty income tiers year over year).

Which got a royalty nerd like me wondering… the uniformly positive “takeaways” in their reports always, let’s say, differ from what the hundreds of independent labels and publishers we work with at IC seem to be going through… does this data reveal anything interesting that Spotify is leaving out, intentionally or otherwise?

The answer turned out to be yes, and analyzing it has grown into an annual tradition.

So I’m back again with my trusty spreadsheet, healthy skepticism, and non-existent graphic design skills to try and illuminate what’s really going on at the world’s largest music retailer. The spreadsheet includes methodology notes, and you’re welcome to make a copy, poke, prod, and holler at me at about it anytime at hunter@infinitecatalog.com.

Agree!

Because what’s really going on is… not great, especially for working- and mid-tier artists, though there is some good news this year.

We’ll get into the good news later. In Part 1, it’s pretty grim.

Part 1: The Incredible Shrinking Spotify Slice

In 2025 the Spotify pie grew +$1B, while the average per-artist slice shrank (at least) -$217

The big tension in the music industry’s streaming era is this: the overall income pie keeps growing, while the average slice paid to individual artists, lately at least, keeps shrinking. On that front at least, this year is no different.

“THE $11B GROWTH ENGINE” goes Spotify’s big headline this year. $1B in new pool money in the past year alone.

Meanwhile: the average $ per artist slice shrank year over year (at least): -$217. The 10% growth in income is great, but it came alongside (at least) an ~11% growth in artist pool headcount, so the average wage went down (at least) -$217, or -0.7%.

About those “at least”s. Spotify gives us the total revenue in the pool, but they only report the number of artists earning $1k or higher, so we don’t know how many earned between 0-$1k. (Despite the demonetization of tracks with fewer than 1k streams, you can still (and many, many do) earn between 0-$1k).

Every single reported tier increased in headcount, so I think it’s fair to say the unreported bottom tier increased as well – hence the overall average slice shrinking “at least” -$217.

And when the average slice shrinks, even if your income went up, it went up less than it otherwise would have.

Which is a familiar feeling these days — even when you’re making more, it still feels like you’re falling behind — because in a very real sense, you are. Spotify, it seems, is a microcosm of the collective experience in our current version of capitalism, where every individual is, in a very real sense, losing.

The four year picture is worse (even with a recovery), and with inflation it’s brutal

Was this a one time deal?

Our spreadsheet has data going back to 2022. Let’s look at the average slice itselfover the years, by dividing the total dollars by the total number of artists (aside from the unreported $0-$1k ones of course, so keep that “at least” logic handy).

The average slices over these years went like this:

• 2022: $37,657

• 2023: $34,655

• 2024: $36,496

• 2025: $36,280

A huge dropoff from 2022->2023, then a recovery, then last year’s -$217 dip. Overall, the average slice has fallen (at least) -$1,377, or -3.7%.

About that recovery. Guess when Spotify raised prices? July 2023, and again in July of 2024. So 2024 is the year that saw the fullest benefit of those, before the number of new artists joining the pool once again began to outpace the growth in dollars. And while it’s great they finally raised prices, for my money, what this actually does is prove their decade-long suppression of artist wages prior to this, as we’ll talk about in the next bit.

Also there’s also this thing called inflation, and while it may not seem fair to Spotify to bring that into the mix, it’s certainly very relevant to both a) the artists trying to use their royalty dollars to make ends meet, and b) Spotify’s decade-long refusal to raise prices in step with it – which, as we can see from the 2024 recovery, would have had a majorly positive impact on artist wages.

Inflation gets applied to the slice, and from 2022-2025 it was roughly 10% across the US and EU (slightly higher in the UK). This turns the -$1,377 loss into a “real” decline of roughly -$5,100, or -12.4%, in purchasing power over four years. At least!

Again, broadly speaking that’s impacting every artist in the pool, even the apparent winners. During a period that saw two price hikes, and the royalty pool grow $2B. Big yikes.

It’s not just more mouths to feed

To be clear, new artists joining the pool is a good thing!

Making the music industry more hospitable to working- and mid-tier artists is kind of the whole point of this report (and Infinite Catalog, natch). So I don’t think the “problem” is “more new artists joining the pool.” Which also means that the solution isn’t limiting or reducing that number by, say, raising the 1k stream threshold or some other arbitrary gatekeeping mechanism.

Of course, the massive increase in new artists joining the pool also includes a lot of scammers, money launderers, slop generators, artist impersonators, etc, who siphon money away from what we must now call “real” artists.

Beatdapp has estimated the amount being siphoned off at around 10% per year, which would be a cool $1.1B in 2025. Spotify claims to be doing more on this front, and as we’ll discuss in Part 3, it appears that they actually are, which is great and worth celebrating.

But when you couple the vibe of the report with the reality of a shrinking slice, it starts to feel like being told you should be grateful for your seat on an increasingly crowded and sinking ship, while the owners of that ship profit from your slow-motion demise on their nearby yacht. So I don’t really think it’s fair for them to hide behind the “more artists is good” thing, even though it is a good thing.

Especially when it’s NOT just more mouths to feed. Spotify actively does things that suppress artist (and songwriter) wages. Here are three:

Discovery Mode, which “allows” artists/labels to agree to lower royalty rates in exchange for a better chance at algorithmic discovery. This costs Spotify nothing, disadvantages artists who don’t play ball, and is a race to the bottom for literally everyone (the more people opt-in, the less it works).

The legally-dubious “bundling” of audiobooks and podcasts into their subscription tiers shunts an estimated $230M worth of mechanical royalties away from songwriters and publishers in one fell swoop. Granted, this income isn’t included in the Payouts data, but it’s illustrative of how Spotify is willing to increase their profitability at the direct expense of the folks in the music industry they claim to care about.

But it’s the lack of price increases that most clearly demonstrates the role Spotify has had in suppressing artist wages. The price of Spotify is well within their control, so I think it’s fair to say they’ve had a hand in the phenomenon, rather than it being purely a product of systemic conditions or a growing number of mouths to feed.

Spotify kept its US Premium price at $9.99 from 2011 to mid-2023. The cost of this choice, in which growth is prioritized over profitability, wasn’t just paid for by investors while Spotify was running a deficit – it was also borne by artists, whether in the form of the slices shrinking, or just in how much their growth was otherwise held back.

Raising prices is the surest way to grow the slices, and the obvious answer to a rising headcount in the artist pool, but why limit your company’s growth upside when you can get artists to pay for at least a chunk of it?

By comparison, Netflix has a model in which there’s no similar benefit from suppressing prices, and they raised prices repeatedly over the same period. When Spotify finally did raise prices in 2023, the company swung from a €500M loss to a €1.1B profit in under two years, indicating the headroom in price was there.

Unlike Spotify’s other investors, artists got no guarantee of equity, and they certainly didn’t get a say. While everyone else got to cash out, artists got a system incentivized to limit the growth of their individual careers, and a so-called “Loud & Clear” report proclaiming transparency, bought and paid for, in part at least, with their incredible shrinking slices.

Part 2: The Biggest Losers, The $1B Shift, and the $1M Ceiling

While it would appear that Spotify is routinely acting in bad faith and gaslighting the music community about the impacts of their actions, they’re just one of many streamers, the majority of whom operate platforms that work in exactly the same way.

Which is something to keep in mind in this section in particular. The shrinking slice analysis was specific to Spotify, and may or may not be happening at other streamers, especially given specific things Spotify is doing to shrink it, like keeping prices low and “Discovery Mode.”

But Part 2 is about how income is moving around within the pie over the years. Which means that the findings in this section are more likely to be endemic to streaming writ large, and less likely to be due to actions taken by specific actors.

This also means that it’s arguably the bit most worth paying attention to! Especially if you too care about a music economy that supports working and mid-tier artists as well as superstars. Because right now… this ain’t it.

“THE NEW GLOBAL CLASS OF $100K ARTISTS” is the biggest 4-year loser

Things you can’t help but notice when looking at platform economics: the rich get richer, upward mobility gets harder, the middle erodes. (The poor don’t get poorer, actually, they get something worse, which is left behind.)

That’s certainly the case at Spotify. 13,800 new artists in the $100k tier is indeed something to celebrate, as Spotify does this year in the second takeaway of their Loud & Clear report, the all-caps portion of the section header above.

“More artists earning $100k+ a year” IS great — but it’s very different from “artists in the $100k+ tier are doing well.” From Part 1, we know that individually, they’re not (just like everyone else). How are they doing compared to everyone else? I know I gave it away in the section title, but bear with me a second.

We can measure how tiers are doing compared to each other by looking at their change in “poolshare”, aka the amount of income that each tier accounts for within the pool overall.

Alas: the $100K+ tier is the biggest poolshare loser in the four years I’ve been tracking this. Here’s the table:

So it seems likely that unchecked platform economics are indeed doing that thing they do: hollowing out the middle.

The change in poolshare also tells us the change in where the money is, well, pooling. I’ll give you one guess where.

$1B+ has shifted from working- and mid-tiers to the “elite” tiers during the same period

So the “elite” tiers earning $1M+ gained a total of +3.52 percentage points worth of poolshare, while the mid- and working-tiers ($1K–$500K) lost, well, exactly that: -3.52 points. Poolshare is a zero sum game — one group’s gain is another’s loss.

In dollar terms, we can think of it this way: compared to the 2022 poolshare distribution, more than $1B has shifted from the working and mid-tier artists to the elite-tier.

This “money concentrating at the top” issue is, mind you, completely different from the shrinking-slice problem discussed in Part 1.

So it comes with its own set of drawbacks, namely making it increasingly difficult for labels to justify investing in artists who aren’t aiming to be massive pop stars.

Speaking of aiming to be a pop star…

There’s a new $1M ceiling in town

Remember when I said that a consequence of platform capitalism always seems to be “upward mobility gets harder”? Here’s what upward mobility looked like this past year:

Within the working and mid-tiers, upward mobility did get easier. More artists moved up or into these tiers than the year before, which is good news — more about this in Part 3.

But where it goes (and stays) negative – where fewer artists moved up or into tiers than did the year before – is near the top of the ladder, where the wealth is concentrating. It’s the new ceiling.

Contrast this with Spotify’s 3rd takeaway, “MILLION DOLLAR CAREERS”, which is wall to wall obfuscation and misdirection.

In it, they frame the 1,500+ artists now earning $1M+ as evidence that streaming is building a new professional class. They describe the $10M+ artists as having “graduated” to that level, as though they moved up and made room for others to follow. And they go so far as to suggest that capturing a tiny fraction of Spotify’s total streams is enough to get there, as if $1M is just sitting there waiting to be claimed, rather than other artists’ loss.

Meanwhile, the data shows that only 90 new artists entered the $1M club last year compared with 200 the year before, a 55% drop.

So while some artists are moving up the ladder, fewer and fewer of them are moving up past the $1M mark.

And above the ceiling, the wealth continues to concentrate. We’ve already mentioned the over $1B that, since 2022, has shifted from the working and mid tiers and into the $1M+ ones. But looking into how that breaks down within those tiers further, it’s an even bigger horror show:

• $10M+ (80 artists): +$830M (81% of the entire shift)

• $5M-$10M (150 artists): +$342M

• $2M-$5M (510 artists): +$57M

• $1M-$2M (800 artists): -$206M

So despite being in the “elite” tier grouping, the $1M–$2M tier is actually a net loser. What really happened was: $1.2B went to the $2M+ and up tiers— a billion from the working and mid tiers, plus another $206M from the $1M–$2M band beneath them.

80 artists at the $10M+ level captured 81% of the total shift. Out of 303,000! Basically, the money flows up past the $1M tier and pools at the top. Here’s the full table:

Which means I need to adjust what I said above, about how wealth concentrating at the top is likely to make it “increasingly difficult for labels to justify investing in artists that aren’t aiming to be massive pop stars.”

Correction: the new ceiling, and the upward flow of revenue even WITHIN the top tiers, means it’s increasingly difficult for labels to justify investing in artists that AREN’T ALREADY massive pop stars.

Which, in the opinion of someone interested in a vibrant and exciting music ecosystem vs. a system that only works for a few established pop stars, is even worse.

What’s causing this?

Algorithms are reinforcement mechanisms. The more something gets listened to, the more it gets recommended, the more it gets listened to.

Discovery Mode pretends to address this, but it does so while reducing the income an artist actually receives for their streams, so it wouldn’t show up as a positive impact in the above charts (or in, you know, real life, outside of “exposure”).

There’s also the general breakdown in media and criticism. Big pop stars don’t require as much context… that’s why they’re big pop stars. A “Best New Music” on Pitchfork or a bunch of positive reviews used to change your career trajectory, now it barely registers. This is far more dire for working and mid-tier artists, because that context helps audiences both find and appreciate them.

Combine that with the “paradox of choice” phenomenon where, when confronted with a ton of options, people tend to go for the known, safer thing. In this case, already well-known and often older music benefits, music that for the most part was released in a time before streaming was the main game in town.

You could argue that, aside from Discovery Mode, these latter reasons aren’t really Spotify’s “fault” exactly. But the “all you can eat streaming buffet” is very much at the heart of both of these second points, and I think it’s fair to say that Spotify has been the most aggressive proponent of exactly this system.

They got what they wanted, and they got rich. Aside from the super-elite tier artists, everyone else seems to be losing in the bargain.

Part 3: Good News, A New Hope, and an Old One

Part 3 is about cracks where the light’s getting in.

There’s at least one positive takeaway for working- and mid-tier artists in the 2025 data, and there’s an increasing amount of both push and pull for broader solutions, which could see those cracks expand into the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

From 2024→2025, poolshare improved (!) for working- and mid-tier artists (!!)

I promised you good news, and here it is. For the first time in 3 years, poolshare – the percentage of the total Spotify income pool attributable to each tier – has actually improved for (most) working- and mid-tier artists:

2024→2025

Those green numbers in the working- and mid-tiers are a beautiful thing; it means those bars on the proverbial income ladder are getting stronger rather than weaker.

Of course, poolshare is a zero sum game, so other tiers are losing – though it’s interesting that the corresponding losses are spread out, between the $1K, $100k, $1M and $5M tiers.

Contrast this to poolshare changes in the previous two years: a clear divide where the upper tiers gained, the lower tiers lost:

2023→2024

2022→2023

Mind you, the brutal four year trends discussed in Part 2 include the positive turn of events in 2024→2025, so the overall trend really has been super extra bad.

But for now, this is good news for anyone who cares about a healthy ecosystem in which artists can survive or even thrive without having to become superstars.

To drive this home, I’ve taken the extraordinary step of an actual chart, showing the poolshare changes by group in each of the three years we’ve been tracking it:

would you look at that

So what caused the improvement? It’s not demonetization…

The 1K-stream demonetization threshold didn’t do it, that’s for sure. It’s unthinkable that $1M+ tier artists would have more demonetization happening due to that policy compared to mid- or working-tier artists.

In fact, since it’s more likely that mid- or (especially) working-tier artists are having some of their tracks demonetized, it follows that this change in poolshare is happening in spite of the 1K-stream threshold.

The $1K+ artist tier – the one most likely affected by the policy – did lose .07 percentage points of poolshare, but the tiers above gained .18pp, .30pp, and .20pp respectively, so even if you attribute all of that loss to the demonetization threshold policy, it doesn’t come close to covering the gains.

Plus, that and the other so-called “artist-centric” policies went into effect in April 2024, so they were in place for much of that year, when everyone below the $1M+ tier still lost poolshare.

… it’s not “Discovery Mode”…

The cause is also highly unlikely to be “Discovery Mode”, a program that allows artists/labels to opt tracks in to being boosted in the algorithm in exchange for a lower royalty rate on those streams.

Discovery Mode simply removes money from the overall pool; it doesn’t redistribute it elsewhere (except into Spotify’s pocket, for the privilege of gaming a system they invented, at the expense of everyone else, for an unknowable “exposure” impact, at decreasing ROI the more tracks get opted in. Can you tell I hate this program.)

And given the whole point is to improve your chances of “discovery,” it seems likely that the working- and mid-tiers opt-in at disproportionately higher rates than the $1M+ tiers. Plus it’s been in place since 2021.

So as with demonetization, Discovery Mode is highly unlikely to have been the cause of the 2025 improvement, and is much more likely to have been a drag on the working- and mid-tier gains.

… but it might have been the spam track purge.

A more likely explanation for the working and mid-tier gains in 2025: the removal of 75 million spam tracks, which Spotify announced in Sept 2025 and noted was something they had been doing over “the past 12 months.”

Streaming fraud hurts all artists in two main ways: lowering the stream rate (via bots inflating the stream count), and pulling legitimate streams away from legitimate artists via actual listeners streaming spam (and presumably leaning wayyyy back while doing so).

Removing spam tracks (and their streams) therefore has two corresponding impacts: improving the overall stream-rate for everybody, and redirecting legitimate spins back to legitimate artists.

All things being equal, the reclaimed dollars would get redistributed according to poolshare; but poolshare for the $1M+ tiers vs. the working- and mid-tiers combined were split almost exactly 50/50, so that doesn’t explain the poolshare shift in favor of the latter.

It’s possible that redirected streams from legitimate listeners actually DO flow disproportionately to working- and mid-tiers. Perhaps people who are leaned so far back they don’t notice they’re listening to spam would be more likely to let less well-known artist streams play through, as opposed to people who are more intentional or just want to hear the hits. So maybe an unequal redistribution of these streams in favor of working and mid-tier artists explains it to some degree.

But here’s what I think is the most likely answer.

As with demonetized tracks, spam tracks – and the spam artists they’re attributed to – are far more likely to be within the mid- or (most likely) working-tiers.

Remove spam artists from those tiers, as we expect would happen in a 75M spam track purge (whether through direct removal, or just them dropping out of the tiers due to having their tracks/streams purged), and you raise the average earnings of just the tiers in which those artists appeared, which in turn raises those tiers’ poolshares.

So the theory is basically: remove spam from the pool, get poolshare gains for the working- and mid-tiers.

And those gains are real! Sure, the dollars will get re-distributed disproportionally to the better-off due to the pro-rata system, but they’re disproportionally impacting the working and mid-tier artists positively, by the simple logic that the dollars mean more to each artist the lower down you go.

A one-time deal, or the new normal?

Alongside the 75M spam track purge announced in September 2025, Spotify announced the introduction of new spam filters to help improve the situation moving forward.

If they actually work – a big if, given how scams tend to get more sophisticated in step with countermeasures – maybe it’s the new normal. Perhaps the explosion of AI music tools and subsequent slop/spam deluge will continue to push the famously laissez-faire Spotify to be more vigilant on this front.

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to tell from next year’s data one way or the other... if the filters are working and keeping spam tracks and artists out, it wouldn’t show up in the data as clearly as a 75m track purge.

What’s wild is that streaming fraud hurts literally everybody from the bottom to the top. Fixing it simultaneously helps the rich most in terms of pure dollars, while also helping the working- and mid-tiers most in terms of % of take home income.

So you’d think removing spam and reducing streaming fraud would be something that everyone can push Spotify and other DSPs harder on… unless of course, “legitimate” artists and labels are also getting in on the action.

If the change in poolshare next year reverts back to “rich getting richer, everyone else losing,” we’ll know there’s more work to be done. Speaking of more work to be done…

Let’s talk solutions

One final recap of what Spotify’s own data from 2022-2026 has shown us:

1. A shrinking per-artist slice, reducing literally everyone’s take home pay

2. An eroding middle class, with the $100K tier seeing the biggest losses

3. Faltering upward mobility, with a new glass ceiling at the $1M tier

4. Vast amounts of income shifting upwards, from the working- and mid-tiers to the $2M+ and up tiers and pooling at the top

5. Poolshare improving in 2025 for most working- and mid-tiers, seemingly due to taking action on streaming fraud

What solutions would address these issues?

A new hope…

I love this beautifully articulated proposal from Louis Posen of Hopeless Records and ORCA: baking “Direct-to-Fan” directly into streaming platforms.

He identifies that unlimited streaming for a fixed price removes supply and demand from the streaming equation, capping both the value fans get for their subscription and the ability for artists and labels to offer more to make more.

In order to “transition from a volume-based utility to a value-based marketplace” he proposes a “Direct Access” layer letting artists and labels sell additional content, merch, access, and experiences directly to fans in addition to the all-you-can-eat buffet of music.

Indeed this sounds an awful lot like a version of the “super-fan” offering that Spotify has been claiming to want for years. Maybe that means it can actually happen.

… and an old one, which I will never stop advocating for

But the most obvious solution (which is not mutually exclusive to the above, and indeed builds on it) continues to be an old one: switching to a user-centric model, in which your streaming dollars only go to what you actually listen to (as opposed to pro-rata, in which your streaming dollars get distributed pro-rata to the entire pool, meaning mainly and increasingly to superstars).

I know it’s not a new idea, that it’s long been opposed by the majors, and that it might seem like a lost cause. But I can’t let it go, for three reasons:

One, it either directly or indirectly addresses every issue we’ve described, including reducing streaming fraud, since bot accounts could no longer stream their way to profitability.

Two, the more wealth concentrates at the top, the fewer and fewer artists actually benefit (albeit increasingly handsomely) from pro-rata.

This means the viability of doing away with pro-rata, and the necessity of doing away with it if we want a remotely sustainable industry, is constantly increasing.

A study from 2018 found that the top .4% of tracks earn 10% of the income, and that switching to user-centric would reduce this to 5.6%, redistributing the difference downward. In our very own spreadsheet we found that in 2025, the $1M+ tiers, a total of .5% of all artists included, captured 49.6% of the income.

Tracks are different from artists, but as wealth continues to concentrate at the top, by the very nature of pro-rata, the case for user-centric continues to get stronger.

But the immediate redistributive and longterm egalitarian impacts of user-centric aren’t even its best features, imho.

Even better, user-centric would undoubtedly get more fans to buy in, knowing they can directly support the artists they love without giving up the ease of streaming.

The common narrative that “streaming doesn’t pay artists” holds everyone back, and is a direct consequence of pro-rata. Fixing that would improve things dramatically.

How many more people would pay for subscriptions if they knew their dollars actually went to the artists they listened to, and that those dollars made a real difference?

How much more would the average person spend if there was a direct access layer, or indeed, all streaming subscriptions were “pay more if you want”?

How much more would fans engage with the wider ecosystem, from merch to tickets to everything else, if they were more directly connected to the artists they love?

In Conclusion…

I have a theory that you simply cannot stop artists from moving culture forward.

All the money and power in the world can line up against them, and artists will find a way to keep creating. That money and power can make artists’ lives harder or easier, but they’re not going to stop, and people will continue to pay attention, get excited, and happily support the artists that inspire them, some how, some way.

While writing this, a jury determined that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is an illegal monopoly. If that ruling holds, we’ll likely see increased competition, a reduction in ticket prices, and an improvement in working conditions for artists.

Though separate from the issues of streaming and royalties, it makes me hopeful that change at the highest levels is possible. Indeed if labels, distributors, and service companies continue to consolidate, perhaps a silver lining is that it will be easier for them to actually push for changes that will benefit them, the artists, and everyone else. A fan can dream.

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Thanks for reading! Questions, comments and expressions of all sorts can be sent to me directly at hunter@infinitecatalog.com.

This report is brought to you by Infinite Catalog, royalty accounting software used by hundreds of independent labels, managers, publishers, and artists to simplify royalties and grow their catalogs. Try it free today, and sure why not, use code LOUDERANDCLEARER to get 30% off 3 months or an annual plan.