Instead of divvying up a given listener’s $10 per month to the artists he or she streamed (excluding Spotify’s roughly 30 percent cut), the subscription money is put into a collective pool that is distributed by aggregate play counts across the platform. Spotify and other prominent streaming services have divorced the listening habits of individual users from the allocation of the money that each pays for the service. “They think that if they are playing all Zoë Keating, that the portion of their subscription that is going to the artist is all going to me. “Whenever I try to explain to fans how streaming payouts actually work, fans have been shocked,” she says. Part of the problem may be the way Spotify calculates royalties, which is based on the 2 million streams Keating received rather than the 241,000 people who listened to her music. The fact that Spotify and other streaming services offer paltry payouts to artists is widely known-Keating, in fact, has helped bring the issue to light by posting her streaming income for years. Who Should Mark Zuckerberg Debate About the Future of Technology? The Bird Box Effect: How Memes Drive Users to Netflix She provided that figure, too: $12,231, or about half a penny per stream.

Of course, the key number missing from this data deluge was the amount of money Keating made from so much worldwide engagement. She generated 2 million streams from 241,000 fans in 65 countries who listened to her music for a combined 190,000 hours. Zoë Keating, a cellist based in Vermont, posted her Wrapped graphic to Tumblr in December. The data collectively reinforced the power of Spotify’s brand: It’s global, it’s personalized, and it’s increasingly omnipresent. Artists got in on the action, too, sharing their own versions of the Wrapped graphic with data on total streams, number of listeners, and the countries where those listeners resided. Instagram-ready graphics detailing every user’s most streamed songs and artists became empirical proof of fandom, a dorm-room poster for the digital age.

Among the glut of lists on the internet toward the end of last year, Spotify’s Wrapped 2018 broke through, perhaps landing on more social media feeds than any other.

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