So you're in a band, or you're an artist, and you want to throw your music out there on the Internet. You've read all about services like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Google Music, though you're still not too sure exactly what the pay rates are. Fortunately, David Lowery of The Trichordist has figured it out!
In a post on HypeBot, Lowery breaks down the streaming revenue of an independent label with about 150 albums in its catalog, and who generated approximately 115 million streams per year. This study is contained to the calendar years of 2016
For starters, Lowery notes that Spotify's pay rate for artists has gone down from $0.00521 per song in 2014, to $0.00437 in 2016. However, he says that for the label, Spotify generates 62.97% of its total online streams, and those streams translate to 69.57% of its total online profits from streaming.
Apple Music pays out $0.00735 per song, makes up 7.18% of the label's streams and 13.35% of its revenue, and Google is $0.00676 per song, 2.36% of streams and 4.03% of its revenue.
Then there's YouTube, whose payout is $0.00069 per song, makes up 21.70% of the label's streams, and constitutes 3.81% of its revenue. So y'know, don't even bank of making it rich as a musician on YouTube… or Spotify for that matter, if the rates keep dropping.
