Spotify updated its loud and clear annual report on Wednesday, touting numbers that the streaming service says reflect an increasingly global music industry as creators from around the world generate more hits.
In the report, Spotify said artists from 75 different countries generated at least $500,000 in streaming revenue last year, compared to 66 the year before, with about half of the average artist’s streams now coming from outside their home country.
“It’s been exciting to watch the business transform over the past 20 years and help music become less centralized,” says Joe Hadley, global head of music and audience partnerships at Spotify. Hollywood Reporter In an interview. “There are stars here, but also emerging artists and the upper class who can make a living, and there is also the globalization of music that has happened alongside that.”
Also reflecting the growing number of global genres reaching critical mass, Spotify said songs in 16 different languages reached the platform’s Global Top 50 chart, double the number of languages on the chart in 2020. Brazilian funk was the fastest-growing genre to generate at least $100 million on the platform last year, followed by K-pop.
“Music is more global than ever,” says Hadley. “We had Bad Bunny, a Spanish-language indie artist, performing at the Super Bowl. K-pop is no longer a niche space. Afrobeat is global music, and Mexicana is exploding. Brazilian funk is one of the fastest growing genres on Spotify. 20 years ago, that would have been very difficult to imagine. I think the takeaway here is that music is increasingly borderless.”
While the Spotify Loud and Clear report often shares statistics that reflect the changing nature of music consumption on the platform, at its core, Spotify started the initiative in 2021 as an attempt to clear up misconceptions about the streaming economy and give music creators more transparency about how it drives its streaming service. Low pay for streams has been many musicians’ biggest criticism of Spotify for years, and while new data released by Spotify likely won’t dispel those concerns, it does suggest that more artists are finding audiences.
Spotify’s payments to the industry surpassed $11 billion in 2025, an increase of $1 billion from the previous year, and the number of artists who made at least $100,000 last year increased by 1,400 to a total of 13,800. Meanwhile, Spotify reported that a third of artists who made at least $10,000 last year were DIYers or at least started out as DIYers. However, with millions of songs on the platform not getting a single stream — let alone the thousand required to actually get paid at all — the business still reflects a system that very few artists crack, even if the number is growing.
“Building a career in music has never been easy,” Hadley says. “One thing we always come back to is that roughly 70 percent of our music revenue goes back into the industry. In other words, our incentives are aligned. When artists grow, we grow, and we grow when they earn more. What we see in the data is that more and more artists are earning more meaningful income than before.”
Along with the record, Spotify said Tuesday that last year marked the largest annual music publishing payment in Spotify’s history, a notable claim given the rift the streaming service got into with music publishers in 2024 over its move to cut royalty fees for songwriters based on its controversial bundling strategy. Spotify did not disclose how much the company paid music publishers last year but said it paid $5 billion over the past two years.
