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How Many Music Streams Does it Take to Earn a Dollar?

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Music Streams 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 serviceAvg. payout per stream# of streams to earn one dollar# of streams to earn minimum wage*
Napster$0.0195377,474
Tidal$0.012580117,760
Apple Music$0.00735136200,272
Google Play Music$0.00676147217,751
Deezer$0.0064156230,000
Spotify$0.00437229336,842
Amazon$0.00402249366,169
Pandora**$0.001337521,106,767
YouTube$0.000691,4492,133,333

*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:

artist spotify streaming payouts

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.

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Visualizing Internet Usage by Global Region

In this infographic, we map out internet usage by global region based on the latest data from the World Bank.

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Map showing internet usage by region.

Visualizing Internet Usage by Global Region

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Digital technologies have become an integral part of our daily lives, transforming communications, business, health, education, and more. Yet, billions of people around the world are still offline, and digital advancement has been uneven.

Here, we map internet usage by region based on data from the World Bank’s Digital Progress and Trends Report 2023.

Digitalization Has Been Uneven

According to the World Bank, between 2018 and 2022, the world gained 1.5 billion new internet users.

In 2020 alone, the share of the global population using the internet increased by 6% (500 million people), marking the highest jump in history. India, in particular, has seen high rates of adoption. For example, in 2018, only 20% of Indians used the internet. By 2022, this percentage had grown to more than 50%.

RegionIndividuals using the internet (% of population)
East Asia & Pacific74
Europe & Central Asia87
Latin America & the Caribbean76
Middle East & North Africa77
North America92
South Asia42
Sub-Saharan Africa34

However, the progress of digitalization has been uneven both within and across countries.

In 2022, one-third of the global population remained offline, with parts of Asia and Africa still experiencing very low rates of internet usage. For instance, more than half of businesses in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Senegal reportedly lack internet connection.

According to the World Bank’s report, when fast internet becomes available, the probability of an individual being employed increases by up to 13%, and total employment per firm increases by up to 22%. Moreover, firm exports nearly quadruple with the availability of fast internet. Across Africa, 3G coverage has been associated with a reduction in extreme poverty, with reductions of 10% seen in Senegal and 4.3% in Nigeria.

Curious to learn more about the internet? Check out this animated chart that shows the most popular web browsers since 1994.

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