The rise of music streaming platforms has taken a toll on the artists that create the music that we love. Ever since the birth of streaming, artists have been concerned about how they’ll get paid for a product they created. This graph shared on Reddit shows that they have a good reason to be concerned. User u/fjogurpiano collected 7 years of data on their music streaming to determine which services pay the best and just how many plays they need to make just one dollar.

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The streaming services they examined are:

• Amazon Unlimited
• Tidal
• Deezer
• Apple Music
• Spotify
• Amazon Prime
• TikTok
• Meta

Amazon Unlimited offers the best rate. It took 116 plays to earn $1, similar to the service, Tidal which needed 122 streams for this musician to earn a dollar. Spotify is the most popular streaming platform in the world, but they are not one of the best-paying. It took the graphic creator 373 plays to earn a dollar. They’re not the worst paying though. TikTok isn’t very profitable. It took 1,134 plays to earn a dollar with many Redditors in the comments complaining it took them even more than that. But Meta was by far the worst at 200,042 plays before the artist saw $1. The Redditor that posted the information added details about the data in their blog and mentioned that Spotify’s new royalty payment system makes matters worse. They won’t pay out on songs that have less than 1,000 plays which is sure to damage indie and emerging artists.

This may be the most colorful visualization of history we’ve ever seen! This chart shows every single color of Crayola crayon ever made. Given the company’s long history, that’s an impressive and long list of colors! Over the years they’ve made many special and limited editions sets of crayons, so you may not have realized that the company has made over 400 crayon colors. And yet, it’s true! Since the first set of crayons was made back in 1903 with a simple set of 8 colors, the company has become a childhood staple and experimented with all kinds of different colors, styles, and twists on the wax crayon. You can see it for yourself on the visualization:

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Scanning over these colors is a real trip down memory lane. Crayola doesn’t have all these colors in circulation anymore. You might remember glitter crayons from childhood or the neon set. Or what about scented crayons that smelled good enough to eat? Many people feel nostalgic over the smell of Crayola’s which comes from a substance called stearic acid, which is derived from beef fat. Unfortunately, you can’t buy every color in the graph fresh and new (though plenty of people sell them used for collectors.) Crayola does sell a huge set of 120 crayons for a well-rounded set of what they offer. Only the most avid collectors might experience all 400 colors, but we can come close with the colorful visual of the long history of Crayola!

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the United States is home to 33.2 million small businesses. Combined, these make up 99.9% of all U.S. businesses! Here is an even more surprising fact; small businesses were responsible for 63% of all new jobs created between 1995 to 2021. We might imagine that big companies are churning out the jobs, but in reality, America is built on small companies striving to succeed! So what does it take for a small business to thrive in the United States? Many factors play a role, but as with many money matters, location is key. The team at Finfare has created this incredible index to highlight the best and worst states to start a small business. Check it out:

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We love indexes like this! They combine multiple relevant data sets to create a bigger, more insightful picture. This index includes factors such as corporate tax rate, state unemployment tax, LLC fees, average monthly commercial electric bills, minimum wage, commercial spaces for lease, and business survival rates within one year AND five years. All together, these facets create a more trustworthy outlook on the best places for small businesses. If there is a specific factor you want to know more about, there are top five lists below the main chart. I was impressed and surprised that California has a one year business survival rate of 86.8%! I figured that there would be plenty of cutthroat competition there. It drops down to 55.7% after five years, but that is still the third highest!