IFPI reports trade revenues from streaming rose 10% in 2023 to reach $19.3 billion, and we estimate Spotify contributed about $7 billion. Spotify also rewarded music publishers with about $2 billion in royalties. 

Spotify’s Loud & Clear data on royalties paid to the 225,000 professional and aspiring artists served to its 600 million users reveals a bulge in the middle part of the distribution in favour of Spanish language artists as the service expands in Latin America.

The top 1,000 earners are mainly artists at the top of the charts in the US and UK markets, which together contribute half of Spotify’s revenues and thus royalties. Top earner and top all-time streamed artist Taylor Swift earned over $100 million in 2023. 

UK consumers bought £123 billionof goods online in 2023, up 63% on 2019 (vs 7% for offline). Online sales of non-store retailers, such as Amazon (and Temu, Shein, Next), reached £60 billion in 2023, of which Amazon—a nascent online advertiser in the UK—accounts for about £43 billion.

The pandemic’s structural boost to the online channels of store retailers—which operate on the open internet, outside online walled gardens—lifted sales to £63 billion in 2023, up a huge 78% on 2019. With more competition for spend in straitened times, they are using advertising more aggressively.

The open internet is also the domain for online-transacted services: the return to in-person experiences drove the biggest ecommerce gains since 2022, as consumers purchased services online worth an estimated £291 billion in 2023 and rising.