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In 2023, Taylor Swift is outshining her musical peers on multiple fronts. Earlier this week, she achieved another major milestone when she was named Spotify’s Artist of the Year for 2023.
As part of its annual year-end wraparound list on Wednesday (November 29), Spotify announced that Swift has racked up 26.1 billion streams globally on the service since January 1, topping the likes of three-time champion Bad Bunny as well as The Weeknd, Drake and Peso Pluma. This isn’t entirely surprising given the continued success of her late 2022 album, midnightin addition to bringing back two chart-topping recordings: Speak Now (Taylor Version) And 1989 (Taylor version)the latter of which racked up a whopping 375.49 million official on-demand streams in its first week.
Swift’s year on Spotify is better than any artist ever on the platform, which — 15 years after its launch — continues to expand its user base annually. For comparison, when Bad Bunny was announced as the top wraparound artist in the previous three years, he had 18.5 billion streams in 2022, 9.1 billion in 2021, and 8.3 billion in 2020.
according to paintingAccording to Swift’s royalty calculator, Swift’s 26.1 billion streams amount to about $97 million in recorded music revenue. And the year is not over yet. When estimating its total streams through December, that number rises to 27.2 billion, which equates to $101 million in recorded music revenue through the end of the year from Spotify alone. Add to that publishing revenue, and Swift’s music will have earned about $131 million on Spotify by the end of the year.
Of course, this only explains Swift’s performance on Spotify, which remains the leader in the streaming market. When counting on-demand streams across all platforms — including big ones like Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music — painting It estimates its catalog generated a total of 38.3 billion streams through the end of the year, which amounts to a total of about $160 million in registered royalties, through paintingEstimates. With the publication, Swift’s total on-demand streaming revenue is approaching $200 million.
It is worth noting that SWIFT will likely take the lion’s share of these funds. In her contract with Universal Music Group and Republic Records, signed in 2018, she retained the master rights to all of her music from now on. This includes her four re-recordings Taylor version Albums so far: fearless, red, talk now And 1989. This re-recording project – which she became famous for after she acquired her previous label Big Machine Records Scooter BraunIthaca Holdings in 2019, much to Swift’s chagrin – its performance likely exceeded even Swift’s wildest dreams. It has proven to be a profitable maneuver for the star Taylor Editions It has consistently outperformed the originals in live streaming since its release.
That’s not bad for someone who famously pulled her catalog from Spotify less than a decade ago, calling it a “major experiment.”
Additional reporting by Glenn Peoples.
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