How Much Does Spotify Pay Per Stream

The average amount that Spotify pays artists each stream is between $0.002 and $0.008. So, roughly speaking, 70% would go to the artists or rights holders and 40% would go to Spotify.

Music on Spotify earns two kinds of royalties:

• Recording royalties: The money owed to rightsholders for recordings streamed on Spotify, which is paid to artists through the licensor that delivered the music, typically their record label or distributor.
• Publishing royalties: The money owed to songwriter(s) or owner(s) of a composition. These payments are issued to publishers, collecting societies, and mechanical agencies based on the territory of usage.

When an eligible song gets played on Spotify, the rightsholders receive royalties for it, whether it’s played by a Premium or ad-supported customer.

How Spotify calculate and process royalties

Spotify distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders. To calculate net revenue, Spotify subtract the money they collect but don’t get to keep. This includes payments for things like taxes, credit card processing fees, and billing, along with some other things like sales commissions. From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.

Spotify calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder.

Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.

How artists and songwriters get paid

In many cases, royalty payments happen once a month, but exactly when and how much artists and songwriters get paid depends on their agreements with their record label or distributor – or collection societies and publishers in the case of songwriters. Once Spotify pay rightsholders according to their streamshare, they pay artists and songwriters according to their individual agreements. Spotify has no knowledge of the agreements that artists and songwriters sign with their labels, publishers, or collecting societies, so Spotify can’t answer why a rightsholder’s payment comes to a particular amount in a particular month.

Here are our top findings from 2022 data

The number of artists generating $1M+, as well as those generating $10,000+, has more than doubled over the past five years

Spotify royalties are powering artists’ careers at all stages. In 2022, 57,000 artists generated $10,000+ (up from 23,400 in 2017). And 1,060 artists generated $1 million+ (up from 460 in 2017).

These figures represent revenue generated from Spotify alone. When taking into account earnings from other services and recorded revenue streams, these artists likely generated 4x this revenue from recorded music sources overall, plus additional revenue from concert tickets and merch.

In 2022, for the very first time, 10,100 artists generated at least $100,000 on Spotify alone. That’s up from 4,300 artists five years ago.

What’s more, these artists hail from more than 100 different countries around the world. Streaming has lowered barriers to entry. Artists who—in the past—might have struggled for opportunities are now finding their audiences.

In 2017, the 50,000th highest-earning artist generated $2,840 on Spotify. In 2022, that figure was 4x as much: $12,584.

Spotify and streaming are driving a healthier, more diverse music industry than ever before. As a point of comparison, a radio station typically plays a rotation of the Top 40 songs, while even the largest record store in the heyday of physical record sales, carried the music of a few thousand artists.