Which Streaming Service Pays More?

By Charles Cleyn | Any musician dreams of going professional and making money from their favorite craft. One of the easier ways of making money from music production is to upload your work to popular streaming services. Expanding your reach and increasing listens on these streaming services aside, choosing which ones to invest more is a difficult task on its own.

The reason is that each streaming service has different types of payouts, payment systems, and rates. There’s also the matter of whether you’ll get a cut of the ads, the size of the service’s user base, royalty payment factors, etc.

Being unaware of these details will heavily affect your earnings as you may release a highly anticipated track or album with your fans buzzing and generating plenty of clicks and listens. Still, at the end of the month, you receive a majorly disappointing paycheck, all because you weren’t aware of the payment structure unique to each streaming service.

That said, let’s get into how streaming services pay artists, how much they pay, and which factors play the most significant roles.

Streaming Service Payment Systems
Before comparing payment rates of different music streaming services, it’s vital to know which royalty payment system they use and what rate they have. The royalty payment rate is the amount you are paid per stream of your songs.

The two main royalty payment systems are pro-rata and user-centric. The pro-rata system is the most popular method of calculating royalty payment for streaming services; Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music are the services that use this system. This system calculates royalties based on the total amassed streams on the service.
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Read the full article here:
https://www.charlescleyn.com/blog/which-streaming-service-pays-more

For more on streaming services payments, check out these two articles:
https://www.musicradar.com/news/spotify-ceo-content-zero
https://forums.musicplayer.com/topic/190131-spotify-rant/

[Thanks to Jamie Krutz for alerting us to these stories: https://www.jamiekrutz.com]