CD Baby, one of the world’s largest distributors of music for DIY artists, just released a fresh set of stats recently. The company has confirmed that it paid out $125.4 million from digital and streaming services to artists across the course of 2020. That’s around $2.4m every week.
The $125.4m annual figure was up by 13.9% on the $110.1m that CD Baby paid to indie artist clients from digital platforms in 2019.
CD Baby paid musicians more than $126,000,000 in 2020.👀💰https://t.co/tBvshGjT7m
— CD Baby (@cdbaby) March 5, 2021
CD Baby – which counted 950,000 active distribution clients as of the end of Q2 2020 – has also broken down exactly where this money came from. Some 40% of the company’s digital royalty payouts in 2020 were from Spotify, which contributed just over $50 million. Apple Music was once again the second biggest contributor of digital revenues to it’s artists in 2020 (18.5% of the company’s total digital revenue in 2020). YouTube‘s music app (including its subscription element) contributed $10.5m to it’s artists last year, more than doubling its contribution from 2019.
CD Baby also recently announced that it is expanding its international artist services team to Africa. For growth in South Africa and other markets across Southern Africa, including Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, and Namibia.