Australian Acts Now Generate $300M In Royalties on Spotify: Report

Australia’s recording artists are struggling to be seen and heard, but they’re anything but invisible on Spotify.

According to new data published today, May 26th by the streaming giant, Australian artists generated more than $300 million in royalties on Spotify last year, up 14% from the previous year.

That’s an all-time high, a result that represents three times the royalties generated by homegrown acts back in 2017.

Indie artists are flexing their considerable guns.

In 2024, more than half of all royalties generated by domestic talent on Spotify were by independent artists or labels, the Sweden-based business claims.

The data is published in the annual Loud & Clear document, which unpacks the success of Australia’s artist community on its platforms.

The vast majority of listeners are from foreign lands.

More than 80% of all royalties generated by Australian artists were from listeners outside of Australia, placing Australia in the top 10 exporters of music worldwide.

Australia is “a global music powerhouse,” comments a rep from the streamer.

Drilling into the data, Australian made music was played more than 57.1 billion times globally on Spotify in 2024. Also, some 1.6 billion playlists feature Australian artists, with over 99 million of those playlists made by Australian users.

“There is such a huge support for Australian music abroad,” comments Ziggy Alberts, in a statement provided by Spotify.

“There’s so much incredible music coming out of here, and so many artists I know touring,” says Alberts, whose sixth and latest album New Love, dropped at No. 18 on the ARIA Chart in February.

“We need to look at how great the arts are, not just for the spirited joyfulness of life, but from an economic sense… because it’s a great economic result for all Australians. What it reveals to me is that we have a great export of Australian music.”

The Australian insights are revealed several months after the streamer announced it had distributed than $10 billion to the music industry last year, an all-time high.  

The biggest hitters from these parts include CYRIL, FISHER, The Kid LAROI and Royel Otis, remarks Spotify’s AUNZ Head of Music Ben Watts.

“The Australian music industry is now bigger than it has ever been, due to Spotify’s ability to uplift Australian artists on a global stage and empower listeners to discover more music than ever before,” Watts tells TMN.

“The figures show that a borderless music industry has created new paths to career growth and success for local artists who can create fanbases all over the world, all at once.”

Currently, Spotify boasts over 678 million monthly active users, including 268 million paid subscribers, and is available in 184 countries.

Read the report in full here.