Ever wondered how many streams it takes for an artist to make money? Read on to find out this year’s pay rates for artists on popular streaming plattforms.
A guest post by Janelle Borg of AmplifyYou.
According to ex-Design Ethicist at Google Tristan Harris, “We all ‘live in a city called the attention economy.’” Digital service providers, a.k.a. music streaming service, thrive on the attention economy. While they enable artists to reach global audiences without touring or direct advertising, these platforms often make headlines for their payouts.
But how do their payouts work? And how can artists get the most out of DSPs?
The Basics
Platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Deezer don’t have a fixed “pay-per-stream” rate. Instead, there are a variety of different payouts systems (800 systems for Spotify only). The rate depends on variables such as:
- The listener’s country/territory
- Whether the listener uses the freemium, ad-supported version or the paid, subscription model
- Promotional stream
- Distributor/label negotiated rate
- Pricing/Currency/Inflation in each territory
When taking all of these factors into consideration, we can conclude that all streams are equal, but some are more equal than others. That being said, artists need to take other elements into consideration, instead of cutting DSPs out completely.
When comparing it to the pre-DSP era, 1 million streams on an album was actually equivalent to approximately 1000 album sales, which wouldn’t make an artist a star in the pre-DSP era. While more and more artists are reaching…