So how much do artists make when their songs are streamed rather than purchased?

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If you’ve ever wondered how much artists (performers, songwriters, etc.) are paid when their songs are streamed on services like Spotify, Amazon music, and the like, as opposed to being sold, say on iTunes, hopefully these few paragraphs will answer that question. 

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I’ve posted 3 songs for online sales using TuneCore since the beginning of the year (Calendar Year 2019).  I had previously made a song available for online sale in 2015, and it ended up being purchased a dozen times, generating a whopping 9 dollars and some change.  Hence, I still have my “day job.”  I think a few songs I’ve written since then are substantially better, I started making them available for sale on iTunes & other services for a few months now.  It seems, however, that the marketplace and sales model have changed by shifting much more toward “streaming” and away from sales.  The difference for songwriters and performers, economically speaking, is substantial.

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Whereas a song “sale” (iTunes, Amazon Music, etc.) generates for the seller anywhere between 60 and 85 cents, a typical stream generates between .01 and .04 of a penny.  According to my TuneCore sales data (a service which I love, by the way), the exact revenue earned by the seller depends on not only the service used by the buyer to stream or purchase the song, but also on the country in which that purchase transaction is initiated. See excerpt from my most recent quarterly TuneCore sales report below.

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As you can see, I had 5 “sales” between March and June, netting me $3.50 in revenue.  By comparison, my songs were streamed a total of 361 times during that same period, netting me a total of $3.09 in revenue.  Accordingly, if I want to earn, say, $500 from streams, listeners will have to stream my songs somewhere around 58,000 times.  Ugh.

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According to “75 Amazing Spotify Statistics and Facts (2019) By the Numbers,” there were 232 million active Spotify users in 2019.  Initially that makes of attracting 50,000 streams seem not all that unachievable because if only one in every 4,640 of Spotify’s active users steams my songs one time, that’s my $500.  That shouldn’t be so hard, right?  Not so fast.

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As of August 2019 there were over 50,000,000 songs on Spotify, and as of June 2018 (most recent data point I could find), 24,000 new songs were being uploaded to Spotify every single day.  The number is likely larger now. 

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What’s the point?  If you are an independent artist who wants to earn a little cash on your musical creations from time to time, it’s not enough to make good music, you need listeners to be able to find it.  Comment yet There are some great online video tutorials about how to use “Google Trends” and paid Facebook ads to help reach and win fans (i.e. potential purchasers and streamers), but I’m just starting to experiment with those techniques, so I can’t comment yet about how well they work—or don’t, but I’ll report back in a future post about what I tried and how it worked… or didn’t.