Artists are entitled to royalties from having their songs streamed on music sites like Apple music, Spotify, Google play music and other streaming sites.
The boiling question is how much do these artists make from the system.
Details of the exact figure that artists earn in royalties are quite hazy but there are certain estimations that are in order after some privileged sites have gotten information from real artist and third party sites.
Some of these streaming sites don’t have a fixed pay because the payment vary from artist to artist and is dependent on a couple factors.
So it’s impossible to single out a figure as the accurate amount artists are being paid.
Some of the Factors That Influence Payment
Some key factors that affect the kind of payment an artist will receive from having his/her song streamed on music stream site include;
- The artist’s designated royalty rate
- The listener’s country or location. For instance, Nigerian music will appeal to Nigerian audience especially if it’s sang in vernacular. So the number of streams will be limited by that factor.
- If the artist is using a paid account or a free one
- How big the site is and the size of its audience
The last factor there stands out as the most important and that’s the route this article will take – how much some of the world’s top streaming sites pay an artist per stream and that includes YouTube.
Check out the following streaming sites below and how much they pay per stream. Remember the currency is in dollars – the international currency and you can convert according to your country’s exchange rates.
Apple Music
Apple music is one of the highest paying streaming sites in the world. From paying $0.0064 per stream in 2017 to $0.00783 per stream in 2019, artists on the platform across the world would require a minimum of about 200, 000 streams to earn the US minimum monthly wage amount.
Napster
Naspter is also one of the highest music streaming paying platform on the web right now.
According to digital music news, this site pays $0.01682 per play and now they pay $0.019 per stream.
In order to meet up with the U.S monthly minimum wage amount, an artist would need to attain 77,474 plays. This site has about 5 million subscribers.
Spotify
This site used to be one of the lowest paying streaming platform but they’ve improved over the years.
They increased from paying $0.0038 per play to $0.00397 per play.
At the moment, they pay $0.00437 per play. Over 87 million subscribers on this platform.
Amazon
Amazon happens to be the lowest in the list and they are conservative with their user metrics.
According to Digital music news, Amazon once paid an artist $0.0074. That figure declined to $0.00402 making it the lowest.
An artist will now need a minimum of 366, 169 total streams to meet up with minimum wage amount in the U.S.
Youtube
YouTube is still lagging behind after having a record not being artist-friendly.
From paying artist $0.00074, they decided that paying $0.00069 would be better making an artist to first attain a minimum of 2, 133,333 total plays to meet up with the minimum wage amount in the U.S.
YouTube should be the last place any artist should be looking in earning royalties from song streaming save for videos.
