1 BILLION STREAMS A DAY?

When it comes to Spotify, there are numbers we know about— 75 million active users, 20 million subscribers, $3 billion in royalty payouts— but Tuesday afternoon, the Spotify engineering team tweeted out a little factoid that was not previously known.

We process nearly 1 billion streams every day by running 9000 @hadoop jobs on our 1300 node cluster. For personalization, analytics etc

— Spotify Engineering (@SpotifyEng) July 21, 2015

Applying that metric to 75 million active users, it breaks down to 400 streams per month, or 27 hours of listening, not factoring in song skips. In terms of payouts based on Spotify’s average per-stream rate of $0.006 and $0.0084 , 1 billion streams a day would generate between $6m and $8.4million a day for rightsholders, with annual costs of between $2.2bn and $3.1bn.

There's still some fuzzy math around this however, as questions remain. For instance, how much has that per-stream royalty rate fallen since 2013 when it was last published by Spotify? They've added millions more users since then. And just how close to 1bn did the engineering team mean by, "nearly"?

And then the sticky but very real issue of music skips; If 35% of Spotify’s 1bn daily streams are skipped before they generate a royalty payment, that changes all of these figures considerably.

However, at the end of the day one thing is clear: Spotify is steadily growing into a vibrant ecosystem for music worldwide, and nearly a billion paid streams is a hell of a lot better than a billion free ones.