Spotify has forked out billions to pay back artists

The streaming giant has paid $7 billion to music industry rights holders last year

This money makes up almost 25 percent of the industry’s total revenues.

As part of that sum, Spotify has paid its top artists millions of dollars each.

The news was announced on the company’s Loud And Clear website, which aims to increase transparency around its payments.

Spotify says over 52,000 artists earned more than $10,000 from Spotify last year.

A hundred and thirty of those artists were paid more than $5 million over the last 12 months.

Spotify didn’t name any of the artists involved, but its most-streamed acts last year were Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake and Justin Bieber.

How does Spotify measure payouts on its site? 

Spotify says they do not have insight into each artist and songwriter’s agreements with their chosen rights holders, therefore they can’t report on how much artists profit from their Spotify performance.

“We can only report the data that’s available to us, which is the amount of money that has left Spotify,” they say.

The streaming platform adds that they don’t pay artists directly, instead they pay rights holders selected by the artist.

Popstar Olivia Rodrigo had the most-streamed song on Spotify last year with her song Drivers License.

Spotify is the highest paid-subscription music service globally with over 180 million paying subscribers.

Savannah Pocock contributed to this report.