Artists on Spotify receive approximately $0.003 per song played, while the company’s CEO Daniel Ek earned $345 million last year. According to Consequence, no other artist on the platform has earned that much in their career.

In order to get $345 million from song streams, artists need 115 billion plays on their tracks. The closest to this figure is Drake, who has amassed 100 billion plays across all his albums and singles in 15 years, and this is still not enough.

$0.003 is the approximate price for one stream. It is already well known that Spotify has secret deals with some artists who are paid more than others. This may mean that Drake could receive more from Spotify in his career than the company’s CEO does in a year, but we’re talking about one of the most successful artists in the world.

In the case of less popular artists who don’t have billions of streams on their songs and who haven’t received special offers from the streaming platform, things could be worse. This information alone suggests that artists, who should be the main value of a music service, are valued less than its CEO.

As previously reported by AP News, Spotify paid $9 billion to its artists in 2023. In total, 1250 artists received more than $1 million, 11600 received more than $100 thousand, and 66000 received more than $10 thousand. These payments have almost tripled since 2017, but still do not reach the level of a CEO.

In addition, at the end of 2023, it became known that Spotify was preparing changes to royalty payments. One of the changes was that a song would have to reach a certain mark before it could generate money for artists.