Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists like me. We need you to make some noise | Damon Krukowski

What its Wrapped campaign doesn’t say is that indie musicians and labels are treated terribly, and deserve a better deal

It’s that time of year when Spotify urges its artists and users to brag about their 2023 usage of the platform, via a heavily promoted programme called Spotify Wrapped. Artists are given dazzling figures for how much our music was streamed – for instance, it said people had spent enough time on the platform with my old band Galaxie 500 “to walk from the Earth to the moon four times”. My current band, Damon & Naomi, only provided the soundtrack for a comparatively modest trek, “from Berlin to Beijing three times”.

What it won’t tell either artists or users in Spotify Wrapped is how much money was paid for all that streaming time. Short answer: not enough. If you want to do the maths, the maximum one can possibly earn in Spotify royalties is $0.003 a stream. It doesn’t add up to a living wage for most artists.

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