Spotify recently released its Annual Music Economics Report in an effort to “increase transparency by sharing new data on Spotify’s royalty payments and breaking down the global streaming economy, the players, and the process.” The report does exactly what it says on the tin, covering key aspects such as the streaming giant’s yearly payouts to the music industry, the number of artists generating over $1 million through Spotify and the rise of independent artists. Gaining an insight into the finances of such a huge business is important, and transparency with streaming is great to see considering many artists’ historical disagreements with the service. However, we couldn’t help but notice that Spotify conveniently left out a few crucial details.
At Decent, we pride ourselves on our “no bulls**t” approach to music PR. Transparency is at the core of what we do, because an open and honest industry benefits all artists. Given that Spotify was the highest-paying streaming platform last year, we think it’s only fair to scrutinise its claims of transparency. And there’s one big question we want answered:
How Much of Spotify’s Payouts Went to Ghost Artists?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term “ghost artists”, here’s a quick rundown for you.
A Harper article from January 2025 exposed a peculiar phenomenon: many artists featured on Spotify’s editorial playlists were “mystery viral artists” – musicians with millions of streams but virtually no online presence. These artists were often signed to stock music companies, used AI-generated artwork, and had suspiciously generic branding.
Perhaps most worryingly, however, is that they discovered Spotify actually partners with many of these artists/production companies, which provide the platform with “music Spotify benefitted from financially”.
So, according to the article, Spotify has financial ties with these artists and the production companies that create their music. That means Spotify is not just a neutral platform – it benefits directly from the streaming revenue of these ghost artists.
Now, this might not seem like such a huge deal to some. I mean, if they’re creating good music and people are listening, surely it’s fair?
The problem is that Spotify often appears to be favouring these artists over real, independent musicians. They are often placed in prime spots on mood-based playlists (playlists to set a mood, such as Deep Focus, Lofi Chill etc). We’ve covered how important editorial playlists are for artists here, and since this is often a vital aspect of promoting and getting paid for your music, this could pose as a roadblock for many growing artists.
Essentially, you’re not only competing with other artists to get your music on these playlists, you’re also now competing with the platform itself. To put this into perspective, DJmag estimates around 500 ghost artists are on Spotify, but their work is created by a small group of 20 writers. How can we trust these Spotify stats if these ghost artists aren’t taken into account?
Spotify Stats Need to be More Transparent
To be clear, we aren’t suggesting that artists don’t release their music on Spotify. It’s still an integral part of releasing music in 2025. However, if the platform wants to be completely transparent about its payments to artists, this data needs to be revealed, since there could be a huge portion of the money given out to artists that simply goes straight back to Spotify. Until Spotify discloses exactly how much of its payouts are funnelled back into its own ecosystem through ghost artists, its claims of transparency will remain questionable at best.
