Spotify says UK music industry ‘in really strong position’

Tuesday 03 March 2026 12:59 pm

50 artists generated more than £1m on Spotiy. Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images

A year ago, the UK music industry was in a bout of slipping global chart shares and fewer breakthrough stars.

Yet following this weekend’s Brit Awards, Spotify claims that export growth and rising royalty payments are pointing to an industry revival.

In 2025, the streaming giant paid out £860m to UK artists and their rights holders, a six per cent increase year-on-year and more than double the level in 2018.

Around 150 UK artists generated more than £1m on Spotify alone last year, while more than 75 per cent of royalties were driven by listening outside the UK.

Andy Sloan-Vincent, Spotify’s head of music for Europe, told City AM: “These aren’t all just superstar pop stars. It’s folk singers who have small, targeted audiences. It’s feature artists on dance records”.

“And also, 150 is the cut-off point we’ve chosen, but the 151st makes around £975,000, so it’s an arbitrary gap that we’ve put in. The pyramid runs really deep, £860m goes a long way.”

Spotify says the number of UK artists generating more than £500,000 a year on the platform has more than doubled since 2018, while 45 per cent of royalties generated by UK artists in 2025 went to independent artists or labels.

Sloan-Vincent added: “I think the industry’s in a in a really strong position. It does come down to artists, it does come down to development, it comes down to music and fandom”

He claims that the UK continues to punch above its weight globally: “At a population level, we are the second biggest music market in the world. We are one of the biggest exporting businesses, we’re one of four exporting countries which is the UK, Korea, US and Sweden. Everyone else are net importers so, yeah, we punch pretty hard on a global stage.”

Global export growth

More than 75 per cent of UK royalties on Spotify in 2025 came from overseas listeners.

While the US remains the largest export partner, Sloan-Vincent said the mix of markets is shifting.

“Typically, in the past, that would be the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Anglo markets. But what we’re seeing now is that while the US is still our biggest export partner, second is Germany, then Australia, and then Brazil and Mexico”, he said.

“British music is now carrying around the world into huge music markets – and markets that potentially weren’t very financially exploited in the past”.

Spotify also says UK artists were discovered by first-time listeners more than 13bn times in 2025.

“I have another incredibly large number in my head, which is that there were 13 billion artist discoveries in the past year,” Sloan-Vincent said. “What it means is basically a user listening to an artist for the first time globally, that’s for British artists.”

Revenue streams under scrutiny

Meanwhile, the wider debate about streaming payouts continues, with some artists arguing that per-stream returns remain too low.

But Spotify maintains that its model is transparent and revenue-linked.

“I think Spotify pays out 70 per cent of its revenue. It’s like a very flat, straightforward number that 70 per cent of all the money Spotify makes gets paid out to rights holders”, Sloan-Vincent said.

He added that Spotify forms part of a broader earnings mix for artists, saying that if an artist makes £1m from Spotify, for example, they’re making £4m overall through other streaming platforms, downloads, physical, merch, touring, all the rest of it.

“We’re feeling really confident about the amount of revenue we’re driving into that UK business,” Sloan-Vincent added.

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