It’s just over two years since Spotify introduced changes to its payouts, including only paying recorded-music royalties for tracks that have been streamed at least 1,000 times in the last 12 months.
Now a report published by Bulgarian indies body Anmip-BG has criticised the change’s impact on artists from the Balkans region. It’s based on a survey of 71 independent labels and producers in south-east Europe.
The key findings: 65% said they have suffered a ‘significant negative impact’ (i.e. revenue loss) due to the changes, while another 20% reported a ‘slight negative impact’. 92% of respondents said they ‘strongly opposed’ the 1,000-stream threshold.
Anmip-BG and its partners on the report, SoAlive Music Conference and Flat Line Collective, want Spotify to reconsider the threshold as well as appointing more “regional editors and metadata specialists” focused on the south-east Europe region.
They also want Spotify to be classed as a “gatekeeper” platform under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) to give regulators more oversight of how European artists fare on its service.
(One of the criteria for ‘gatekeepers’ is that they have more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU. Spotify had more than 185 million in Europe – the region rather than the political bloc – at the end of September this year. But music-streaming isn’t currently one of the ‘core platform service’ categories covered by the rules.)
The report follows another study earlier this year by SoAlive and Flat Line Collective which claimed that artists from south-east Europe had been “sidelined” by human and algorithmic curation on music services. The new report widens those complaints to include Spotify’s 1,000-streams threshold.
The complaints merit more discussion, so we put them to Spotify to get its response. The company pushed back on the findings in a statement sent to Music Ally.
“For many licensors with meaningful listening — including ones in Southeast Europe who are not represented in this limited survey — overall Spotify payouts increased under this policy, and they are finding success,” said its spokesperson.
They pointed to a recent IFPI report on recorded-music in the EU, which found that the fastest growing markets in the EU tended to be those in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe.
“This study appears to reflect relative figures from a small group of companies, and we’d be curious to understand the actual revenue amounts these respondents believe they’ve missed,” added Spotify’s spokesperson.
“99.5% of all listening on Spotify is to tracks above the 1,000-stream threshold, and those tracks now earn more under this model. It does not appear that the survey accounts for this increase in payouts for eligible songs.”
The spokesperson also suggested that “the tracks affected by this policy previously generated only around $0.02 per month, and those payments rarely reached artists because they fell below distributor payout thresholds”.
There is clearly a disagreement here, given the 65% of labels surveyed who said they’d suffered significant revenue losses. European indies body Impala criticised “de-monetisation thresholds and royalty boosts” on streaming services (not just Spotify, but rivals too) in another report earlier this year.
It said they were “stripping revenue from independent labels and niche genres, disproportionately impacting classical, jazz, regional and non-English repertoire”. So concerns about the impact of these policies goes beyond one region of Europe.
As seen above, though, Spotify is firmly defending its changes and their impact on the overall market. Expect the debate to continue in 2026 – especially if these reports start to attract the attention of European regulators.
