Spotify‘s Top 50 tracks are now collectively earning just shy of US $2m a week from the streaming service – double what they were pulling in this time last year.
That’s according to new MBW analysis of the platform’s streaming chart, which shows the play-counts of its Top 200 most popular tracks every week.
When you add combine the global plays in last week’s Spotify chart week’s Top 50 – that’s w/c: 01/02/2015 – they amount to 282.74m.
Go back almost exactly a year, to w/c: 02/02/2014, and you’ll find that the Top 50’s play-counts reached 141.06m. That means that in the past year, the combine play count of these tracks has grown 100.48%.
Things get even more interesting when you apply Spotify’s rough per-play payout rate to these figures: $0.007 for each stream.
For the Top 50 in February 2014, that amounts to just over $987,000, which would have been split between the artist and songwriters, as well as their label and publisher. (Obviously, the nature of those splits is the subject of some fierce debate – a recent report suggests major labels are keeping 73% of the cash, primarily to cover their outgoings.)
But in w/c: 02/02/2015, the amount of money being paid out to music rights-holders amongst Spotify’s global Top 50 approximately hit an impressive $1.98m.
The hope amongst the artist community, of course, will be that these payouts can keep on growing at a similarly fast rate, without prematurely destroying their income from CD and download sales.
As MBW previously revealed, Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk! is currently played around 15m times last week – generating around $100,000 every seven days.
Interestingly, the furthest back Spotify’s chart widget will allow us to go is the w/c: 29/09/2013. In that week, the Top 50 tracks were streamed 111.288 times.
Using Spotify’s approximate payment calculation, that means rightsholders would have received around $779,000 from those songs.
The currently weekly payout is around 2.5X as big.
[Pictured: The biggest global track on Spotify this time last year was Timber by Pitbull ft. Ke$ha. It amassed 6.7m streams in the week – less than half the current play-count of Uptown Funk.]Music Business Worldwide
