Spotify Royalty Calculator

Spotify Royalties

• Spotify has an average payout per stream between $0.002 and $0.005 (global average about 1/3rd of a penny per stream)
• The royalty rate varies depending on the country, the type of subscription (free vs Premium vs Family etc) and the specific royalty arrangement between your distributor and Spotify.
• Every month the exact Spotify royalty per stream varies depending on the streaming pool for that month.

Get More Streams

Learn the technique i’ve used to generate over 100 million Spotify streams.

Apple Music Royalties

• Apple Music has an average payout per stream between $0.004 and $0.009, roughly double Spotify’s payout per stream
• Just like Spotify this rate will vary depending on the country, type of subscription and the specific agreement with your distributor.

How Does Spotify Calculate Streaming Royalties?

Spotify uses a ‘streaming pool’ model to calculate the exact royalty per stream each month. The easiest way to think about it is that they get all the money they brought in and divided it by the number of streams that occurred that month. In reality it is more complicated than this:

• Every month they add up all the money generated for each country
• Spotify takes a 30% cut to run their business, and the remaining 70% of all revenue is reserved for rights holders
• They split the money generated for each country into each pricing tier they offer
• They divide the amount of money for each country and tier by the amount of streams that happened in each country and tier
• From this they have a royalty rate for each country, for each tier
• Then they pay rights holders based on the number of streams they had in each country for each tier

This is how one artist might be getting $0.0025 per stream and another could end up with $0045 per stream. If you look at the royalty statements from your distributor you’ll also notice that one stream from the United States doesn’t always pay the same as another stream from the United States in the same month. This is because each tier of Spotify subscription generates a different royalty rate.

This is one reason why bots on Spotify are such a big problem. When someone uses bots to inflate their streaming count they’re devaluing the royalty rate for all artists. The more streams that happen in the entire ecosystem the lower the royalty rate becomes, on a country by country basis and a tier by tier basis.

How Many Streams To Make Minimum Wage?

Use our other handy calculator to figure out how many streams you’d need to get to make minimum wage, or any wage for that matter.

Visit the Spotify minimum wage calculator here.