Snoop Dogg has been vocal about artists not being fairly compensated for their music on streaming platforms for a while now, and in a recent interview with Business Untitled podcast, broke down exactly how much he is (or in this case, isn't) being paid.
"In the streaming world, I could show you right now, they sent me some shit from Spotify where I got a billion streams," Snoop said during the interview. "My publisher hit me. I said, 'Break that down. How much money is that?' That s**t wasn't even $45,000."
Spotify announced plans to make changes to its royalty model in October 2023. The changes will possibly come in early 2024, per Music Business Worldwide. The Verge broke down the report and among the possible changes is is a minimum threshold of annual streams for a track before it starts earning royalties. As The Verge reports, "in this scenario, a track would have to earn 5 cents per month in order to be paid or, as MBW estimated, about 200 streams per year. Many indie tracks don’t hit this threshold, and so the pennies those artists would otherwise earn will be diverted to Spotify’s “streamshare” pool. That may not sound like a lot of money, but one source told MBW that, when multiplied over the many, many low-play tracks on the streamer, it accounts for tens of millions of dollars. That would instead get distributed to larger artists, who’d get a bigger share of the pooled money."
The potential move has caused criticism. “Right now, streams and revenue are effectively synonymous, but by this time next year, they will mean very different things,” music industry analyst Mark Mulligan wrote. As The Verge points out, he contends that, in this new system, smaller artists “will be othered, their revenue becoming a new black box for the biggest artists to share between themselves.”
As of October, Spotify had not confirmed the changes. "We’re always evaluating how we can best serve artists, and regularly discuss with partners ways to further platform integrity,” a spokesman told The Verge.