Next month marks the 18th anniversary of Spotify’s UK launch, an occasion that will inevitably be greeted by a tuneless chorus of doom from the cultural establishment. We’ll be treated to performative angst from all those who view the streaming giant as a corporate monster cannibalising musical art. But for those of us with a functioning memory, this grievance misses a blindingly obvious reality: Spotify is one of the genuine marvels of modern civilization.
When I was growing up, a music collection was a luxury only for posh folk. I knew no family with more than a handful of LPs. Maybe 100 tracks were available per household at most. Teenagers couldn’t afford high street records, so my own early musical universe was my parents’ few Val Doonican and Perry Como albums. A friend’s dad had a Johnny Cash LP we all treasured.
As I aged into increased musical desperation, I rigged up a portable mono cassette recorder to capture highlights of Sunday night radio chart shows, usually with frustrating fragments of DJ’s introductions. This was the soundtrack to my later teens, cruising Devon lanes at the wheel of my mother’s Morris Minor. Don’t knock it; that was the only cultural freedom we had.
My hair grew, my horizons expanded, and I started playing in bands – but that musical reality was even more claustrophobic. Unless a cigar-chomping London record executive wandered into a smoky regional pub and handed you a mythical contract, you were invisible with zero chance of anyone outside our tiny social circle ever hearing a note of our music.
And if they did, the old physical music supply chain was an incredibly exploitative system. In the days of the CD boom, record labels, manufacturing plants and high-street retailers took nearly 80 per cent of the shelf price.
The old bloated music industry concentrated its massive wealth at the absolute top. Cash from millions of inflated £15 CD sales didn’t fund a thriving grassroots scene. It funded Elton John’s drug binges, Led Zeppelin’s private Boeing 720’s waterbeds and Keith Moon driving a Lincoln into a Holiday Inn swimming pool. If you weren’t one of a handful of anointed megastars, you didn’t get pressed to plastic. My band simply didn’t exist.
Meanwhile as consumers we bought albums based on glossy covers or single radio spin; if the remaining eleven tracks were garbage, the industry still kept your cash. Today’s streaming landscape is a refreshing meritocracy. If a track is rubbish, you skip halfway. Dump a Spotify song before the 30-second mark and it generates zero revenue. We now hold all the power.
The old bloated music industry concentrated its massive wealth at the absolute top
From Taylor Swift to David Byrne, or even our own Sam Leith, many modern critics view Spotify’s fractional royalty payments as digital exploitation. But the ‘oh please stop whingeing’ truth is that British artists have never had it so good. Last year alone, Spotify paid a record £860 million to the UK music industry (a figure that has doubled in the last decade). Far from a corporate monopoly choking out the little guy, 45 per cent went to independent artists and grassroots labels.
Modern hand wringers miss where the actual greed resides. Spotify pays rights holders. The money a musician actually receives depends on contracts they signed. Just as in the old days, the big, greedy profiteers aren’t streaming platforms, which pay 70 per cent of revenue back to the music industry, but big record labels and useless hangers-on who swallow most of the artist’s share.
If you manage to bypass the vampires, like McCartney or Radiohead have done, the maths of music distribution has created a thriving creative class. Today, around 150 British artists pull in over £1 million a year from Spotify alone according to Spotify’s 2025 industry update; nearly 1,000 UK artists get over £100,000 annually; and around 3,000 British acts get more than the UK average wage from this single app. A solid income, for doing what is, by most metrics, the best job in the world. Compare this to the late 1990s – the most profitable era in music history – when the number of UK artists making any sort of living wage from album sales was a maximum of 1,000 acts at any time.
Spotify now commands 15.3 million paying UK subscribers, plus 8 million free, ad-supported users. If I was a remote teenager in Devon now, I’d grow up with instantaneous, egalitarian access to 100 million tracks instead of my parents’ four Val Doonican records. And any aspiring band, even my old useless long-haired ensemble, can upload any track to that global library without a corporate permission slip. Having said all that, I’m suddenly missing Val Doonican’s version of ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’. I’ll look it up on Spotify after I’ve written this.
No, Spotify hasn’t ruined the music industry; it rescued it from lawless internet piracy, then democratised it for all of us. On its 18th anniversary, we shouldn’t be mourning an overfed self-serving music industry, we should be celebrating the greatest era of musical liberty the world has ever seen.
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