How much music streaming services pay per stream in 2023

Find out what streaming services pay out to artists and labels per listen on a song.

How much a stream is worth is important for an artist to know when they’re releasing their music on these huge new platforms. It is however crucial to note however that there is no consistent payout rate across services and in fact streams can pay out very differently between two artists on the exact same services.

The reason that there is no way to say for sure what a stream is worth on a platform is because the streaming rate is dependent on so many variables which can drastically change the value of a play. The most important elements that decide how much a stream will pay are as follows:

• Whether the listener is a paying subscriber or on an ad-supported free tier
• The territory they are listening from (country and location)
• The number of streams on the service overall
• How many streams other artists on the service are getting

The listener’s subscription (or lack thereof) makes a huge difference, as a subscribers money is worth so much more than a free listener’s – no matter how many ads they’ve seen/heard! Price points for subscriptions and therefore also streaming value change between every territory; so a stream in the US won’t be worth the same as a stream in India.

Then there is the pro-rata model which the majority of streaming services use to distribute their streaming revenues between the artists being listened to on their services. Using this model, all of the revenues that are allocated to be paid out to artists and labels go into one large pot. That pot is then divided out based on the percentage of streams that artists have gotten compared to everyone else.

This system means that not only your own streams, but the streams of every other artist on the service can have an impact on how much you’re earning.

Depending on how your music has been distributed to streaming services, your revenue may also be split by your label or distributor. Labels often take a high percentage cut from the streaming revenues. Distributors will often also take a percentage of the streaming revenue of artists they’re distributing

At RouteNote, we provide artists a choice so that they can distribute their music making the best choice for how much they’re earning on streaming services. Artists can upload unlimited music for free and keep 85% of all of their revenues still – one of the best splits on the market. If an artist is likely to make a lot of streams on their release, they can upgrade to Premium for a one-time fee at a competitive rate to keep 100% of their streaming revenues.

Estimated streaming rates for each platform

With the important disclaimer out of the way, we can still gauge a rough estimate of how much you’d expect to see from each platform as a streaming artist. This information comes from various up-to-date sources online. It is very important to bear in mind that whilst we estimate a rough average streaming rate for platforms that this does not suggest your streaming revenue will be represented on each platform by this average.

Spotify

Spotify pays out between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on their platform.

As always, territory also plays a large part. Reports suggest that streams from the US may earn $0.0039 whilst a listen in Portugal can pay $0.0018.

Artists looking for a rough calculation of their potential earnings from Spotify streams can use this royalty calculator. This tool provides an approximation based on the number of streams, helping artists understand what they might earn from their music on the platform.