We’re almost at that time of the year when artists start receiving emails from Spotify telling them how they’ve done on the streaming site this year. Many will choose to parade the badges proudly across their social media pages, whilst just as many will pretend they don’t care about the numbers.

This year, Spotify Wrapped will start to hit the inboxes from this coming Thursday – and as things stand right now, each and every one of those streams represents a monetary sum. Yes, that amount might be considered to be utterly derisory – and in most cases, that’s because it is – but there is at least some kind of number behind the whole thing, even if no one knows how to work it out.

But as we’ve previously covered on Ears To The House, changes are coming to the way Spotify works from next year. One of those is a minimum threshold a song will need before the streaming behemoth starts paying for it – which we’ve now discovered will be 1000 streams.

In other words, if your song gets 999 streams or less within a 12-month period, you won’t be getting paid for those streams. So whilst major artists like Taylor Swift, Doja Cat, and Olivia Rodrigo won’t suffer as a result, underground dance artists who don’t historically do that well on streaming will inevitably lose out.

And what does this mean for next year’s edition of Spotify Wrapped? Well, quite simply, it potentially means a lot of nothing. For underground artists who release a lot of music, it could mean a pretty big number of streams at the end of each year – but if most of those songs only got a few hundred streams during the 12-month period, the financial link is almost completely broken as a result.

In other words, Spotify Wrapped won’t be worth the colourful JPEGs they’re drawn up on…