Some quick Googling shows 1 million streams pays approx $2000.

You'd need 40,000,000 streams to earn $80,000.

be aware that payout rates change based on tiers and a bunch of other factors. So, it would likely take more than 40 million streams to earn $80k.

I believe Weird Al posted his streaming revenue a few years ago. He had something like 80 million streams and said he earned about $12. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/weird-al-yankovic-wrappe...

There is a reason people like T Swift and whatnot tour constantly, it's how they make money. Weird Al is known for his amazing live shows, there's a reason for it: they make more money.

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vintermann 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.

Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).

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Dylan16807 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.

What are the rough rates for each pool? That's the important part here. And how many artists are far enough from the average ratio that the detail of two pools matters.

https://soundcamps.com/spotify-royalties-calculator/ This site says $0.00238 is typical for "worldwide" and a lot more than that for US and Europe specifically.

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vintermann 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd be interested in knowing that too, as far as I know Spotify doesn't publish details to the public at least.

But I have no trouble believing some artists will be vastly overrepresented in the ad financed pool. Also, there are separate pools by country, and countries have different subscription prices - being big in Japan will be more profitable than being big in India.

Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.

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Dylan16807 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Payout per stream is a terrible metric. It's almost like if you ranked grocery stores by payment per gram.

CDs are usually similar prices. Per-stream isn't nearly as bad as wildly different products sharing prices.

We could debate per stream versus per minute but I don't know if that's a particularly big effect. It causes some annoyance but it's mostly compensated for already.

Anything that gives different value to different artists is probably going to favor the big ones and just make things worse.

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vintermann 9 hours ago | parent [-]

CDs get wildly different number of plays. But the number of plays, whether from a record or from a streaming service, isn't proportional to how glad you are that this music exists and you can listen to it.

The present system favors big artist rights owners a lot, but most of all it rewards owners of music played on repeat, i.e. background music.

	▲	Dylan16807 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do think allocating money per-account or something should be better. Don't let a constant listener allocate the royalties from ten other people. Trying to measure importance feels like a lost cause.

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a022311 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Pudding had a nice article explaining how streaming revenue is distributed: https://pudding.cool/2022/06/streaming/

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Dylan16807 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

When he says "so if I'm doing the math right that means I earned $12" I interpret that as him exaggerating for effect. It's definitely not him citing the pay slip.

"$2 or more per thousand streams, split across rightsholders" seems like an accurate estimate.

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edelhans 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But you only need to record your song once and get money forever. Nobody pays me per function invocation in production, that would be very nice

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cm2012 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

That seems reasonable?

Assume an artist (either directly or through a rights holder) makes 1/3 income from streaming, 1/3 from merch and physical albums, and 1/3 from live events.

40m streams per year would be 800k per week. 200k fans worldwide playing 4 times per week on average could get you there. Thats like a decent sized but not enormous youtube channel.

200k fans worldwide would also support the ticket sales and merchandise sales aspects.

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tayo42 a day ago | parent [-]

You only need 5000 fans to buy your CD/album/w.e at $15 to make 80k

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cm2012 a day ago | parent [-]

Per year, which is a big lift compared to them pressing play on Spotify

	▲	tayo42 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but you need a quarter million people every week according to that guy. That will drop off over time.