Hi, my name's Pepsi and I'm a quirky web developer in Sydney, Australia. You can find me on Mastodon @[email protected], or on Instagram as @hyperbolicpurple.
This site uses publicly available information about Spotify's operating costs to figure out roughly how much money they made (or lost) as a result of your subscription. It was inspired by a TikTok by Campbell Walker, but accounts for differences in pricing and saves you the effort of doing the math yourself.
Okay it's math time.
There's 2 parts to this calculation: corporate operating expenses, and royalty payouts.
It's pretty well known that Spotify pays an average of 0.004USD per stream. UCLA DataRes found that the average length of a song on Spotify is 197 seconds, or about 3.28 minutes. Based on these bits of information, we know that the average payout per minute of audio is 0.0012182741 US Dollars.
For the operating expenses, we turn to Spotify's Form 20-F to the SEC for 2021. Spotify reported a financial cost of 91 million Euro last year, or about 96 million USD. A survey of 2021's Spotify Wrapped showed that the average user listened to 26637 minutes according to their Wrapped, and 365 million active users in 2021. From all this, we can find that the average operating cost per minute was 0.000987399852USD per minute.
From there it's pretty easy: take the number of minutes you spent listening and multiply it by the sum of the two results we found above to find your total cost to Spotify, then subtract the amount you paid over the year for your subscription.
Not long, to be honest, I did it on the the train while going to visit a friend (so about an hour and a half of work). The interface is pure HTML and CSS (plus FontAwesome), while the calculations are done using a ridiculously simple JS script. You can go digging through the source on Github.
Keep in mind, an hour of work means an hour of quality. If you find problems with the method, please leave an Issue or Pull Request on the Github so I can look into it.
I have a Patreon page if you want to give me money, or you can chip in to my Open Collective Projects Fund, or you can share this site with your friends!