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Streaming Music Payouts Reportedly Terrible

Streaming Music Payouts Reportedly Terrible
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(CelebrityAccess) For the past several years, Digital Music News has been covering the payout rates for various streaming music companies and insists that the numbers just aren’t good.

To begin with, last month, DMN took information from third-party websites and artists to rank the services’ per-stream rates and determined few artists are getting rich off of digital music.

Napster had the best rate, paying out $0.019 per stream but still, for an artist to meet the monthly minimum wage amount in the U.S. of $1,472, an artist would need to be streamed 77,474 times. Tidal came in next, paying $0.0125 per stream, meaning artists on Jay-Z’s beleaguered digital streaming platform would need 117,670 total plays per month to make the same amount.

Apple comes in third, paying $0.00735. Artists on Apple Music would need around 200,272 plays to achieve the $1,472 minimum. Google Play is in fourth place with a per-stream rate of $0.00676. Deezer, which hasn’t established a foothold in the U.S., comes in fifth at $0.0064.

With all of the talk about Spotify, it reportedly pays out $0.00437 per play and artists would need around 336,842 total plays per month to achieve the $1,472 minimum income. Worse yet is Amazon, paying $0.00402. (Amazon used to pay indie artists $0.0074 per play, according to Digital Music News.)

Pandora pays $0.00133, and even that is better than YouTube. To earn a monthly minimum wage on YouTube, an artist would need more than 2 billion (with a “b”) streams.

Now The Trichordist has released its streaming music payouts using a single source for its data – a mid-sized indie label with more than 250 albums in its catalog. According to that data, Amazon Music Unlimited pays out the most at a rate of $0.01175 per stream, making it possible for an artist to achieve minimum wage with 125,277 streams.

Napster came in second, paying $0.01110 per play. Tidal was third at $0.00927 per play. Deezer reportedly paid $0.00567 and Google Play Music paid $0.00543. Way down the list was Spotify, paying $0.00311 per stream but the worst abuser was, again, YouTube.

“The biggest takeaway by far is that YouTube’s Content ID, (in our first truly comprehensive data set) shows a whopping 48% of all streams generate only 7% of revenue,” The Trichordist said. “Read that again. This is your value gap. Nearly 50% of all recorded music streams only generate 7% of revenue.”


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