An indie musician is accusing Spotify of engaging in “undisclosed, unfair, and deceptive business practices” that pay smaller artists less.
Mark Kratter, a Connecticut-based musician, filed a complaint last week against the Swedish streamer. He has accused Spotify of employing “opaque rules and undisclosed filtering criteria that disproportionately harm independent artists” and in turn benefit “major labels and high-volume catalogs.”
The complaint claims that, due to the company’s streaming policies, compensation to indie artists is being reduced “by filtering legitimate listening activity, failing to count key engagement signals, suppressing algorithmic discovery, and imposing a 1,000-stream minimum threshold before any royalties are paid.”
The lawsuit claims that in March, the company implemented a change to its streaming algorithm that directly affected Kratter’s streaming numbers.
Before these alleged changes, Kratter’s Spotify streams were “stable and consistent,” meaning that counted streams were proportional to listener activity, the complaint alleges.
But ever since March, his listening data “shows a sharp and measurable decline in counted streams, despite continued listener activity,” as detailed in the complaint. The lawsuit specifically said Kratter’s profile data shows that listener activity on the platform, including saves and playlist additions, exceeded counted streams.
Spotify first implemented its 1,000-stream policy in 2024. This means that in order for a song to be eligible for royalty payouts, it needs to hit 1,000 streams on the platform. When introducing this regulation, the company said in a statement that tracks with fewer than 1,000 streams generated an average of only three cents per month.
The company said in 2023 that “99.5% of all streams are of tracks that have at least 1,000 annual streams, and each of those tracks will earn more under this policy.”
There was no public announcement of a rule or metric change at Spotify in March. The company could not be immediately reached for comment.
Spotify has said previously that it paid more than $11 billion to the music industry in 2025. Nearly 14,000 artists earned $100,000 in Spotify royalties alone last year, and independent artists and labels accounted for about half of all payments, according to the streamer.
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