Technology
How Many Music Streams Does it Take to Earn a Dollar?
How Many Music Streams Does it Take to Earn a Dollar?
A decade ago, the music industry was headed for a protracted fade-out.
The disruptive effects of peer-to-peer file sharing had slashed music revenues in half, casting serious doubts over the future of the industry.
Ringtones provided a brief earnings bump, but it was the growing popularity of premium streaming services that proved to be the savior of record labels and artists. For the first time since the mid-90s, the music industry saw back-to-back years of growth, and revenues grew a brisk 12% in 2018 – nearly reaching $10 billion. In short, people showed they were still willing to pay for music.
Although most forecasts show streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music contributing an increasingly large share of revenue going forward, recent data from The Trichordist reveals that these services pay out wildly different rates per stream.
Note: Due to the lack of publicly available data, calculating payouts from streaming services is not an exact science. This data set is based on revenue from an indie label with a ~150 album catalogue generating over 115 million streams.
Full Stream Ahead
One would expect streaming services to have fairly similar payout rates every time a track is played, but this is not the case. In reality, the streaming rates of major players in the market – which have very similar catalogs – are all over the map. Below is a full breakdown of how many streams it takes to earn a dollar on various platforms:
Streaming service | Avg. payout per stream | # of streams to earn one dollar | # of streams to earn minimum wage* |
---|---|---|---|
Napster | $0.019 | 53 | 77,474 |
Tidal | $0.0125 | 80 | 117,760 |
Apple Music | $0.00735 | 136 | 200,272 |
Google Play Music | $0.00676 | 147 | 217,751 |
Deezer | $0.0064 | 156 | 230,000 |
Spotify | $0.00437 | 229 | 336,842 |
Amazon | $0.00402 | 249 | 366,169 |
Pandora** | $0.00133 | 752 | 1,106,767 |
YouTube | $0.00069 | 1,449 | 2,133,333 |
*U.S. monthly minimum wage of $1,472 **Premium tier
Napster, once public enemy number one in the music business, has some of the most generous streaming rates in the industry. On the downside, the brand currently has a market share of less than 1%, so getting a high volume of plays on an album isn’t likely to happen for most artists.
On the flip side of the equation, YouTube has the highest number of plays per song, but the lowest payout per stream by far. It takes almost 1,500 plays to earn a single dollar on the Google-owned video platform.
Spotify, which is now the biggest player in the streaming market, is on the mid-to-low end of the compensation spectrum.
The Payment Pipeline
How do companies like Spotify calculate the amount paid out to license holders? Here’s a look at their payout process:
As this chart reveals, dollars earned from streaming still don’t tell the full story of how much artists receive at the end of the line. This amount is influenced by whether or not the performer has a record deal, and if other contributors have a stake in the recorded work.
The Pressure is Heating Up
When Spotify was a scrappy startup providing a much needed revenue stream to the music industry, labels were temporarily willing to accept lower streaming rates.
But now that Spotify is a public company, and tech giants like Apple and Amazon are in the picture, a growing chorus of industry players will likely dial up the pressure to increase compensation rates.
Technology
Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues
Dive into the GTA budget through the years, with GTA VI set to be the most expensive video game of all time.

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues
Over 10 years since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), the second most-sold video game in history, Rockstar Games has announced its sequel GTA VI will be “coming 2025.”
As the anticipation only grows for this next big entry in the franchise, we take a look at the GTA budget through the years. How much have the last two games cost to make, how much have they earned, and how do they compare with the latest entry?
Data for this visualization comes from Statista, TweakTown, and Twitch Metrics.
How Much Has GTA VI Cost to Make?
The GTA franchise has grown enormously in scale from humble beginnings as a top-down, 2D video game in 1997. Fifteen installments later, the upcoming release, GTA VI, is estimated to be the most expensive video game to be made yet.
Here’s a look at how much GTA VI and the last two major releases cost, and how much revenue they’ve earned as of August 2023.
Year | Title | Production Costs ($) | Revenue ($) | Copies Sold |
---|---|---|---|---|
2025 (est.) | GTA VI | $2B (rumored) | N/A | N/A |
2013 | GTA V | $265M | $7.7B | 185M |
2008 | GTA IV | $100M | $2B | 25M |
In 2008, GTA IV cost around $100 million—already a budget that rivalled big Hollywood releases. However with 25 million copies sold, the game earned nearly $2 billion—a five-fold return on its production cost.
Five years later, GTA V (2013) cost more than $200 million to make—twice GTA IV’s budget. A decade after its release, GTA V has generated close to $8 billion, with hundreds of millions in annual revenue from subscriptions and in-game purchases—a model that its successor is sure to follow.
In fact, subscription fees and in-game purchases represented 78% of Take-Two Interactive’s (parent of GTA developer Rockstar Games) revenues in 2023.
Analysts estimate the to-be-released GTA VI’s costs at $2 billion, including marketing and other expenses. A massive open-world (set in the Miami-inspired “Vice City”), cutting edge graphics, and a reportedly brand-new game engine are all reasons for the game’s outsized budget.
For comparison, the current most expensive games to have been made include Red Dead Redemption 2 (also by Rockstar) and Star Citizen, both reportedly with a $500 million budget.
Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive shares are up more than 50% for the year.
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