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Music

Spotify Employee Salaries Grow 152% as Musicians Struggle in Age of Streaming

This week the company released its 2015 financial findings, and the average employee is making $168,747.
Image courtesy of Spotify

This week, music streaming platform Spotify released its 2015 financial filings, and Los Angeles publication Music Industry News has taken advantage of the opportunity to deduce the company's average employee salary (via FACT). They found out that from receptionist to CEO, including the range of possible compensation from social security to company shares, the figure is $168,747, or €151,180.

The average salary at the Stockholm and London-based company has increased by 152% since 2010, when the figure was $66,972, or €60,000. Its highest executives and board members alone have seen a 300% increase in compensation since 2014.

Last April, data journalist David McCandless published findings in The Guardian that the average payout per stream for signed artists is $0.001128, not include publishing royalties for songwriting. Furthermore, at the time of the piece's publication they needed 1,117,021 streams in order to make US monthly minimum wage of $1,260. Considering this significant disparity, this situation begs the question of whether songwriting royalties are keeping up in the age of subscription streaming.

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