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‘Spotify Unwrapped’ parody site taken down under legal threat after claiming what artists really earned from streams in 2024

Movies download December 06, 2024

A site parodying Spotify Wrapped has been taken down at the request of Spotify‘s legal team.

‘Spotify Unwrapped‘ spoofs the streaming giant’s annual Wrapped feature, which released its 2024 figures yesterday, to highlight the low pay artists receive from the platform.

Rather than displaying the top genre or song streamed, as Wrapped does, ‘Unwrapped’ calculated the amount users pay in subscription fees, vs the the royalties paid to the artists they’ve listened to throughout the year. They aim to call the company out for “its predatory treatment of artists”, per the website.

However, the site was taken down today (December 5), “at the request of Spotify’s legal team”.

The site is still encouraging artists to calculate the royalties paid to them by the streaming service this year, by multiplying their total streams by $0.003 – the figure Spotify pays per stream. “If you have a label, and/or bandmates that share these earnings, you might also want to divide that total appropriately,” they added.

The ‘Unwrapped’ page now links to the website for United Musicians and Allied Workers’s ‘Justice At Spotify’ campaign, which calls on Spotify to pay artists at least one US cent per stream, adopt a user-centric payment model and make all closed-door contracts public.

Kate Nash recently highlighted low streaming royalties in her “bum on the back of a fire truck” protest, where she headed to the London office of Spotify and said, via megaphone: “Artists are paid 0.003 of a penny per stream whilst [Spotify] demonetised 80 per cent of music on the platform. The shareholders cashed out over 419 million between them.”

She’s among a handful of artists to come out against the streaming platform. Following the release of 2024 Wrapped data, Benefits criticised bands and artists sharing Spotify graphics after complaining about the company “destroying” the industry for the rest of the year.

“I don’t understand how you can support stuff like Kate Nash’s recent protest and then be putting wrapped graphics on every corner of your socials,” they wrote.

Primal Scream bassist Simone Marie Butler also spoke out against the platform, referencing CEO Daniel Ek. She wrote that he is “sitting on his yacht laughing at your spotify top 5 while he cashes in on music he had nothing to do with, calls it ‘content’ and artists still get £0.04 per stream . For new bands the first 1000 streams are still demonetized.”

Butler is referring to the news this year that the streaming service had officially demonetised all songs on the platform with less than 1,000 streams. The policy was launched on April 1, but had been planned by the platform for some time. It was quickly criticised for making it harder for artists to generate royalties from their music and restricting new artists looking to crack the music industry.

Ek also came under controversy earlier this year after speaking about the cost of “creating content”, when referring to music.

The Spotify CEO and co-founder implied that it is easier and more affordable than ever to create “content” thanks to modern technology. “Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content. This has sparked my curiosity about the concept of long shelf life versus short shelf life,” he wrote.

It sparked outrage from artists including Deadmau5, who said he considered removing his music from the platform in response, and Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante who added that Spotify is “where music goes to die”.

Ek later walked back on his comments, explaining in an apology that he had no intention of dismissing the struggles faced by musicians and using the “reductive” label of “content”, and instead “was most interested in exploring was how, in this environment of constant creation, we can identify and ensure that the bold, exciting, world-changing ideas and pieces of art don’t get lost in the noise.”

Earlier this year, it was also reported that Spotify have made record profits of over €1billion (£860m) – following staff being laid off and subscription prices rising.

NME has contacted representatives from Spotify for comment.

The post ‘Spotify Unwrapped’ parody site taken down under legal threat after claiming what artists really earned from streams in 2024 appeared first on NME.



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