Apple Music is now encouraging artists with a financial incentive to make their music available in Spatial Audio, which offers an immersive surround sound experience when listening with AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and other headphones.

Apple will pay up to 10% more per play in royalties for tracks where a spatial version is available. This is starting with January’s payouts.

Crucially, Apple Music users do not necessarily have to listen in Spatial Audio for the artist to be rewarded with the bonus payout.

The metric is calculated based on the proportion of Spatial Available to Non-Spatial Available plays. So if an artist offers all their music in spatial (i.e using Dolby Atmos mastering), they will see the 10% royalty bonus even if no one actually listened to the spatial version.

Apple says more than 90% of subscribers have tried listening to a song in Spatial Audio, and total Spatial Audio plays has more than tripled in the last two years.

Even before today’s announcement, the number of songs available in Spatial Audio has increased nearly 5000% since the feature launched back in 2021, with that number more than doubling in the last year alone. The new financial incentives should help accelerate adoption of Spatial Audio in the Apple Music catalog even further.

The company says the 10% bonus is seen as both a reward for artists delivering higher quality content, and as a form of compensation to recognize the additional time and effort required to mix in Dolby Atmos.