That massive figure still doesn’t include traditional album sales, ticket sales or revenue from other streaming services
Taylor Swift has enjoyed one of the most successful years in music history in 2023, and the Spotify earnings on her catalog more than reflect that. With 26.1 billion global streams this year, the Grammy-winning artist is set to bring in $100 million in 2023 alone.
Billboard first cited that earnings estimate using its recently launched royalty calculator. The 26.1 billion streams came from Spotify’s own announcement as they crowned her the top-streamed artist of 2023. She dethroned Bad Bunny, who was the platform’s most-streamed artist in the world for the previous three consecutive years.
As the calculator reflects, 26.1 billion would equate to about $97.1 million just from royalties tied to the sound recordings. The separate publishing earnings (a separate copyright tied to the song’s written composition rather than the recording) would add approximately $29 million to total about $126 million.
These earnings come as Spotify is preparing to change its royalty system starting early next year in an effort to curb streaming fraud and direct more earnings to professional artists. As part of that initiative, Spotify confirmed in November that songs will need to garner at least 1,000 streams per year to be able to be monetized. Spotify said that would mainly impact songs earning less than a nickel a month, but the policy has been unpopular among some smaller artists who worry their earnings will further deplete.
Swift’s Spotify streams don’t begin to cover the full extent of her total earnings for this year. There’s also streams on other major services like YouTube and Apple Music — where Swift was also the most-streamed artist on the platform. Apple didn’t disclose how many total streams she earned.
There’s also her millions of digital and physical album sales — the Lover artist has about five million, according Luminate — and merchandise sales, plus tickets sold for her Eras Tour. The epic trek itself is expected to become the highest grossing concert tour of all time. And then there’s the Eras Tour movie, which already became one of the top-grossing concert films of all time just in its opening weekend alone and passed $250 million at the global box office.
In short, in the music business, there’s rich, then there’s Taylor Swift rich.