Spotify says artists from 75 countries made $500K+ in royalties in 2025, up from 66 in 2024; ~50% of an average artist's streams came from outside their country
“The takeaway here is that music has become increasingly borderless,” Spotify's Joe Hadley says of the company's latest loud and clear report released Wednesday
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify’s 2025 payout disclosure put its industry payments above $11B, extending a multi-year expansion from the $5B it reported for 2020. This update shifts the focus from total payouts to where commercially meaningful artist earnings are being generated.
The rise in countries producing artists with $500K+ in royalties, alongside the finding that about half of typical streams are international, gives geographic detail to Spotify’s larger 2025 music-industry payout.
First-order effects
- Artists and rightsholders in a wider set of national markets now clear Spotify’s $500K annual-royalty threshold, with 75 countries represented versus 66 a year earlier.
- For artists, international listeners are no longer a marginal audience: roughly half of an average artist’s streams came from outside their home country.
Second-order effects
- Labels, distributors, and artist teams have a stronger incentive to prioritize cross-market release, promotion, and audience-development plans rather than treat domestic performance as the sole commercial benchmark.
- Spotify can use evidence of broader earning opportunities to reinforce its value proposition to creators and rightsholders, after its record 2024 royalty payout disclosure emphasized the scale of its payments.
Third-order effects
- If this distribution continues broadening, streaming could make artist monetization less concentrated in a small set of established music markets, even as platform-level royalty allocation remains central to the business.
- The pattern points to music discovery and revenue becoming increasingly international; whether that produces more durable independent careers depends on how listening and royalties are distributed across artists, not only across countries.
The trend: Streaming is turning recorded music into a more cross-border market, with artist income increasingly supported by audiences beyond home territories.