Digital music distribution juggernaut TuneCore announced today that they had passed a key milestone, reaching $1.5 billion in cumulative revenue paid to artists.

100% of this was passed on to artists, labels or rights-holders, a blog post by Kevin Cornell announcing the numbers stated.

TuneCore’s first quarter payout to artists reached $83 million, a 21% increase year-over-year, while publishing grew 42% and YouTube monetization 48% from 2017 to 2018.

Some other interesting numbers released by TuneCore:

Heavy metal, as a genre, grew the most in 2018 over the previous year (154%). J-Pop had a similar burst (133%), followed by R&B/Soul (68%), K-Pop (58%), World Music (57%) and Instrumental (42%).

Africa saw far and away the most growth in streaming, at 146% year over year. Asia (52%), Oceania (38%), Europe (35%), South America (32%) and North America (31%) followed.

The highest growth for an individual company took place in Morocco (243%), followed by South Africa (125%).