I didn’t listen to a single Taylor Swift song on Spotify last year. She still made money off me.

I didn’t stream a single song from Taylor Swift this past year on Spotify. Yet, I seemed to have paid her royalties.

Spotify Wrapped is a yearly social-media phenomenon, a holiday message from the music-streaming service that tallies who and what we listened to most during the year. My top artist was Galcher Lustwerk — Pitchfork, the online music publication, called his latest album “an understated landmark of underground house” — with my top track being “Parlay,” an eight-year-old song that hit Spotify just last year.

For the record, I respect Swift as an artist and generally have a favorable opinion of her music when I hear it, but I don’t play it myself. The only song of hers I can name off the top of my head is “Shake It Off,” first released almost a decade ago.

When I read Billboard magazine’s estimate that Swift’s music will earn $131 million from Spotify for 2023, I started wondering: Just where is my monthly payment going, and is Swift getting any of it?

Spotify does not report exact figures for royalties, so I used the best available numbers to estimate. The 17-year-old Swedish streaming service pools money it gets from listeners by plan type and distributes it based on total streams by that plan’s subscribers. For example, Spotify’s Premium Individual plan creates a different pool of money than the Premium Family plan.

I’m on the Bundle Hulu Premium plan, which is no longer offered to new subscribers, and I streamed around 200 tracks each month. The average on that plan was 935 tracks per month, which is how much someone would have to listen to for their royalty contributions to only go to the artists they stream.

In the year ending in September, Spotify received about $13.87 billion in total revenue. The company says it pays out “nearly 70%” as royalties, which would be the average of all subscribers worldwide. Taking 70% of total revenue comes out to $9.7 billion. The estimated $131 million in royalties Taylor Swift’s music earned from Spotify is 1.3% of $9.7 billion, so I’ll assume she received 1.3% of all Spotify royalty payments.

Taylor Swift is paid as both the composer and performer of her music, and also owns the master recordings of the “Taylor’s Version” of her albums. That means she collects the majority of those royalties. (She shares more of the royalties for streams of the original versions of those albums with Shamrock Holdings, which bought the master recordings after her original music publisher, Big Machine Records, was sold.)

I paid $123.88 to Spotify in 2023. Revenue is calculated differently for each plan, as is the percentage of revenue used to pay for music.

Between January and September of last year, Spotify reported getting an average $5.69 for each Bundle Hulu subscriber. Taking into account the price increase in September, the monthly average for the year would rise to around $5.82. So, Spotify received around $69.84 from me last year. Dividing content cost by revenue gives the percentage of revenue spent on content. It was lower than I expected, only around 50% for the premium plans. However, it was much higher for the bundles — more than 85% for my plan.

So taking 86.1% of my $69.84 means I contributed $60.13 toward music last year. The rest went toward Spotify’s overhead.

Spotify’s privacy policy allows users to request their own streaming data, so I was able to use a full year’s worth of my own listening history, from mid-December 2022 until mid-December of 2023. It has been reported that Spotify requires a user to listen to 30 seconds to count a track as streamed for payments. After removing streams under 30 seconds, I had listened to 2,404 tracks.

Using the per-track estimate of half a cent, those tracks turned into $12.02 in royalties, or roughly 20% of the $60.13 that I paid into the pool to be distributed. The other $48.11 went to royalties for music that other people streamed. That means 80% of what I paid into the pool to be distributed as royalties went to other artists.

Since Swift scooped up around 1.3% of Spotify’s royalties, that means I contributed around 63 cents toward her $131 million in royalties from Spotify even though I didn’t listen to her for one second last year. She ranks sixth in artists I paid the most to.

So here’s how my $123.88 in total payments breaks down:

Some people saw thank-you videos from their top artists in their Spotify Wrapped. Even though I paid more royalties to Swift than to the country singer-songwriter HARDY, he sent a heartfelt thanks after a successful year. I didn’t hear from Taylor. Nor did I hear from Weird Al, who thanked his fans for streaming his songs more than 80 million times — enough, he said, to buy a sandwich.