3 ms·

At first I was thinking "$4 for 14k plays sounds pretty good!", but then I did a little math. If I listen to a streaming service for 10 hours a week (seems lik

At first I was thinking "$4 for 14k plays sounds pretty good!", but then I did a little math. If I listen to a streaming service for 10 hours a week (seems like a plausible average?), that's about 800 songs per month. So I'm probably paying in the range of a penny per song listened to. If I played 14k songs, that's $140. So only 3% is going to the artist[1], which does actually seem fairly low. To put it another way, he's making the same amount of my subscription as the credit card company is. 1 - We have no idea how much he's previously been paid via advances, etc.

wmf 12y ago
Spotify claims that they pay 70% of their revenue: http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-royalties-overview http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-...
genericuser 12y ago
My initial thought is the amount going to artists with volume like The Rolling Stones, and Bieber (or whatever the kids are clamoring for these days) must command a much higher rate per listen presumably shifting the total percent going to artists to be much higher than that.
- dublinben 12y ago
  There isn't very much variation in the royalty rate for artists on Spotify.
- hatfieej 12y ago
  Regular radio does this. There is a bonus if your music reaches a certain level. At 25,000 performances, it is 1.5x the base rate and goes up to 4x.
hatfieej 12y ago
His $4 number is misleading. You have to look at both his BMI and SoundExchange statements. The webcasting Pureplay rate was $0.0021 per play for 2013. 14227 plays is about $30.