What it Takes for Musicians to Earn $1 with Streaming

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.