[Excellent explainer by Kristin Robinson]

Even if Spotify’s new royalty model won’t pay artists’ whose tracks don’t hit 1,000 streams in a year, songwriters will still earn money from those plays — for now, at least.

As Billboard reported last month, Spotify is planning to implement three changes to its royalty model early next year that would affect the lowest-streaming acts, non-music noise tracks and distributors and labels committing fraud. Under this new scheme, more than two-thirds of the tracks uploaded to that platform will not be eligible to receive royalties — but that change, notably, will only impact about 0.5% of the royalty pool. 

Nevertheless, this has sparked debate around the music community, with some questioning the ethics of not paying artists for whatever streams they garnered simply because they were not popular enough. 

Read the post on Billboard