🟢📣 Louder & Clearer, Part 3: An Old Hope
Cracks in the darkness
Hello and welcome to Louder & Clearer Pt 3!
Using data from Spotify’s very own Loud & Clear report, we showed that the per-artist slice is shrinking, the $100K+ artists are losing the most, there’s a new $1M ceiling, and over $1.2B has shifted from working- and mid-tier artists to the $2M+ and up tiers since 2022. Yikes!
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.
So one last time, crack open that trusty spreadsheet and let’s dig in. Part 3. Here we go.
Reminder! This report is a labor of love on behalf of Infinite Catalog, the royalty accounting software platform I started that now helps hundreds of independent labels, managers, and publishers simplify royalties and report to tens of thousands of artists. Try it free today, and sure why not, use code LOUDERANDCLEARER to get 30% off 3 months or an annual plan.
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:
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:
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:
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 and powerful more in terms of pure dollars, while helping the working- and mid-tiers more in terms of % of take home income. So you’d think this would be something that everyone can push Spotify and other DSPs harder on… unless of course, “legitimate” artists and labels are getting in on the action.
If the change in poolshare next year reverts back to “rich getting richer, everyone else losing,” well know there’s more work to be done. Speaking of more work to be done…
Let’s talk solutions
First one final recap of what Spotify’s own data has shown us:
A shrinking per-artist slice, reducing literally everyone’s take home pay
An eroding middle class, with the $100K tier seeing the biggest losses
Faltering upward mobility, with a new glass ceiling at the $1M tier
Vast amounts of income shifting upwards, from the working- and mid-tiers to the $2M+ and up tiers
Poolshare improving for most working- and mid-tiers, seemingly due to taking action on streaming fraud
What solutions would address these issues?
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.
The one solution to rule them all that I refuse to shut up about
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.
That would be reason three: getting 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” is a direct consequence of pro-rata.
How many more people would pay for subscriptions if they knew their dollars actually went to the artists they listened to, and that they 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. That money and power can make artists’ lives harder or easier, but they’re not going to stop creating, 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.
Last time! This report is a labor of love from Infinite Catalog, a royalty accounting software platform that helps hundreds of independent labels, managers, and publishers simplify royalties and report to tens of thousands of artists. Try it free today, and use code LOUDERANDCLEARER to get 30% off 3 months or an annual plan. Thanks for reading!