Since April 2024, a track on Spotify earns no recorded-music royalties until it has reached 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months.
Spotify announced the policy in a blog post in November 2023, saying the change would start in “early 2024”; the company’s current artist-support page confirms the rule only took effect that April.
The threshold also checks for real listeners
The 1,000-stream bar is rolling, recalculated every month. A track that crosses it earns royalties on every stream from the month it qualifies, and can drop back out of eligibility if its trailing 12-month total later falls under the line.
Spotify also requires a minimum number of unique listeners, so streams from a handful of accounts replaying one track can’t manufacture eligibility on their own. The company won’t publish that minimum, to keep bad actors from targeting it exactly.
Only recording royalties are affected. Publishing royalties, paid to songwriters, still accrue on every stream regardless of a track’s annual total.
Spotify’s own figures explain why it made the change. Tracks with between 1 and 1,000 annual streams were earning about $0.03 a month on average, and together they accounted for only 0.5% of all streams and royalties on the platform.
Distributor withdrawal minimums, usually $2 to $50, plus bank fees of $1 to $20 per payout, meant most of that $0.03-a-month money was never claimed by the artist who uploaded it.
Spotify says the size of its royalty pool is unchanged, roughly two-thirds of every dollar it earns from music still goes to rights holders, calculated separately in each of its 180-plus markets. Reallocating the unclaimed pennies raises payouts on every eligible track by about 0.5%.
The same November 2023 package also raised the minimum length for “functional” tracks like white noise, nature sounds and ASMR to two minutes, to stop uploaders stacking 30-second loops to inflate stream counts.
Artificial streaming now carries a price tag
Spotify also began charging labels and distributors directly, per track, when it detects flagrant artificial streaming on their catalogs. The company hasn’t published a figure for the charge, saying only that it applies to very high rates of manipulated plays.
That enforcement has teeth beyond Spotify’s own systems. On 6 October 2026, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, to 18 months in prison for running thousands of bot accounts that streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music between 2017 and 2024.
Prosecutors said Smith, 54, had pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He forfeited $8,091,843.64, the loss figure both sides agreed on in court, and will spend two years under supervision after his release.
Both sides called it the first criminal prosecution of its kind in the US. The Music Fights Fraud Alliance, an industry group Spotify helped establish in 2023, told the court the sentence would be the public’s first real signal about the actual legal consequences of streaming fraud.
The next day, the US Copyright Office opened a public inquiry into music streaming fraud, after a letter from Rep. Scott Fitzgerald cited Deezer’s finding that up to 85% of streams on fully AI-generated tracks on its platform in 2025 were fraudulent.
For a small synthwave label, the arithmetic is unforgiving
Future City Records, like most independent labels, carries a back catalog of older singles that pick up occasional, scattered plays years after release.
Under the current rule, each of those tracks needs 1,000 genuine streams from enough distinct listeners inside a rolling year, or it earns nothing that period, however many plays it has logged over its lifetime.
That raises the value of steady releases and an audience that keeps returning to older tracks, the approach artists like Timecop1983 and Betamaxx have built careers on, alongside vinyl as a parallel revenue stream.
Spotify hasn’t revised the 1,000-stream threshold itself since April 2024. The next public marker is the Copyright Office’s reply-comment deadline of 21 December 2026, which will shape whatever rules follow.
Lead photo: Kampus Production / Pexels, Pexels licence