Let’s get something straight. The artist doesn’t make much on the song when you stream it on Spotify. Not even close to what you would imagine. I mean, we’re talking fractions of pennies per play. Just enough to make you wonder how anybody ever makes a living in music these days.
How much money artists really earn from streaming varies hugely depending on which service you’re using and where in the world you’re listening from. But here’s the short answer. Not enough. Unless you’re generating a million or so plays, streaming income won’t pay the bills.
What the Platforms Actually Pay
Spotify’s the big one everyone uses. Around 574 million people listen there. Artists get about £0.003 per stream. Sometimes £0.004 if they’re lucky. That’s a third of a penny. Maybe half if the stars align.
Need some perspective? Get 300 streams, and you’ve earned yourself one pound. A thousand pounds needs roughly 300,000 plays. Most bedroom musicians never get close to that.
How much money do artists make per stream on Spotify? Basically bugger all unless you’re pulling Taylor Swift numbers. She’s doing fine. Everyone else is counting pennies.
Apple Music’s a bit better. They pay around £0.008 per stream. Call it a penny. You need 100,000 streams there to make a grand. Still not great, but it’s double or triple what Spotify offers.
Tidal pays the most at roughly £0.01 per play. Sounds brilliant until you remember they’ve only got about 3 million users total. Compare that to Spotify’s half a billion. Higher pay, but hardly anyone’s listening there.
YouTube’s a proper mess. YouTube Music pays about £0.0056 per stream. When people use your track in their videos through Content ID, you get maybe £0.0007. Absolutely pathetic. YouTube handed $8 billion to the music industry last year, according to their reports, but individual artists still see peanuts.
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Nobody Gets the Full Amount
Those rates up there? That’s not what lands in an artist’s bank account. Not even close.
Platforms keep roughly 30% straight away. Fair enough, they’re running the service. The other 70% goes to rights holders. Sounds reasonable except rights holders include everyone. Record labels. Publishers. Distributors. Songwriters. The artist comes last.
Signed to a major label? You’ll bank 15% to 20% of that money, maybe. Indie artists who are working with distributors like DistroKid or TuneCore have more of the pot for themselves, perhaps 70% to 85%, but they, too, pay fees.
So when Spotify pays £0.003 per stream, the musician probably only sees £0.0005. That’s a twentieth of a penny. For one play.
Oh, and Spotify changed the rules in 2024. Your track needs 1,000 streams per year, minimum, before you get paid anything. Below that? Zero. Nothing. They say it’s to stop tiny payments clogging the system. Musicians say it’s just Spotify keeping more cash.
Geography Changes Everything
Where your listeners live massively affects what you earn. Premium subscribers pay way more than free users. Premium streams generate 3 to 5 times more revenue than ad-supported ones.
Someone paying £10.99 monthly brings consistent money. Someone listening for free just generates whatever the ads are worth. Which isn’t much.
How much do artists make per stream Apple Music gives you partly depends on listener location, too. A stream from Britain or America pays significantly more than one from India or Brazil. Subscription costs are lower there, so there’s less money to go around. Some countries pay five times less than Western markets.
Taylor Swift makes millions because she’s got huge numbers from high-paying territories with mostly premium users. Small independent artist with 10,000 monthly listeners across free tier users in cheaper markets? They’re making maybe twenty quid a month.
Free Listeners Are Killing Artist Income
Spotify lets you listen for free with ads. Brilliant for users. Absolutely terrible for musicians. Only about 42% of Spotify users actually pay for premium. But those premium subscribers generate roughly 90% of Spotify’s total revenue.
The other 58% of users listening for free contribute almost nothing. They’re streaming constantly but barely adding to artist payments.
Apple Music doesn’t have a free tier. Neither does Tidal. Everyone pays. That’s why their per-stream rates are higher. More money coming in, fewer streams to divide it between.
YouTube’s got both free and premium, which is why their rates bounce around so much depending on what type of listener you get.
How the Payment System Actually Works
How much money artists really make from streaming through what’s called market share? Platforms pool all the subscription money and ad revenue for a month. Then they divide it based on each artist’s percentage of total streams.
Your songs got 2% of all streams that month? You get 2% of the money pool. Seems fair on the surface.
Except it’s not really. Every single stream on the platform competes for the same pot of cash. When Spotify adds millions of rubbish tracks or white noise uploads, that waters down everyone else’s share. More streams total means smaller slices for actual musicians.
Deezer’s trying something called user-centric payments. Your subscription fee goes directly to artists you actually listen to instead of into a shared pool. Early tests suggest this helps indie musicians and niche genres. But most platforms haven’t bothered adopting it yet.
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What Musicians Actually Do for Money
Streaming’s essential for getting discovered now. You need to be on these platforms so people can find your music. But relying on streaming income? That’s daft for anyone except major artists.
Real money comes from everything else. Gigs. Selling t-shirts and vinyl. Getting your song in an advert or TV show. Direct support from fans through Patreon or Bandcamp.
Spotify might pay next to nothing, but if it drives ticket sales or gets your track placed in a Netflix series, suddenly it’s worth being there.
Some musicians tell their fans straight up to stream on Tidal or Apple Music if they want to actually support them financially. Others focus on building email lists and selling stuff directly rather than chasing Spotify playlists.
How much money artists really make from streaming on YouTube matters less than what else YouTube offers. You can monetise videos. Use Content ID to earn when fans upload your music. Sell merchandise through your channel. Build a proper community. The per-stream rate’s rubbish, but the whole package works better than just audio streaming.
What’s Changed Recently
The industry argues constantly about fair pay. Spotify paid out $10 billion to music businesses in 2024. Artists keep saying they’re not seeing enough of it.
About 13,000 artists make over $50,000 yearly from Spotify alone, according to their data. Sounds like loads until you remember there are millions of artists on the platform. That’s less than 1% making decent money.
That 1,000-stream minimum threshold Spotify brought in? Proper controversial. They reckon it redirects $1 billion toward working artists over time by cutting out tracks nobody listens to. Musicians without big followings say it just makes earning anything even harder when you’re starting.
Platforms keep trying different approaches. Adding tipping features. Bundling streaming with concert tickets. The whole system’s still being figured out because, honestly, nobody’s cracked how to make this fair yet.
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What It All Means
How much money do musicians make from streaming? Not enough unless they’ve got serious play counts. Most artists need millions of streams to make what they’d earn from selling a few dozen vinyl records or doing a couple of weekend gigs.
Anyone can get their songs on every major platform now. That’s brilliant for access. But it’s also made music worth almost nothing per play. Less than a penny is split between loads of different people. For every artist living off streaming, thousands are barely scraping together beer money.
Platforms say they’re paying billions to the industry, which is true. But divide that between millions of artists, labels, publishers, and songwriters? Most people get crumbs.
Want to actually support musicians? Buy their merch. Go to shows. Get tracks on Bandcamp, where artists keep 82% of what you pay. Streaming is convenient, but it’s not making most artists anything near a living.
Don’t get carried away if you’re a musician hitting 100,000 Spotify streams. That’s maybe £300 in your pocket if you are very lucky. This is the modern music economy. It’s a bit rubbish really.
