Ever Wondered What Music Artists Make?

Have you ever wondered how much money music artists make? In particular I'm talking about streaming revenue from all those plays that happen on platforms such as Spotify, Apple music, Amazon music, Deezer and others.

Well I'm about to share with you some insights as to how it works and my average earnings per play.

A Valid Play

Not all plays are created equal and every platform has their own stipulations. Below is a list of the ones that have stuck out at me the most.

Youtube - Pays zero unless you apply for monetization which can't happen until you have 1,000 subscribers AND 4,000 hours of play time on your videos. That's roughly 11 hours a play time each day.

As you can see from my Youtube Channel here I'm no where near that however I do have hopes that one day some of the music will gain some traction there.

Spotify - Spotify considers a valid play only if the person has listened to 30 seconds or more of the track. That means for all those times you listen to 29 seconds or less of a track and skip to the next that artist made nothing. In most cases people skip a track within 5-10 seconds.

Other Streaming Platforms As far as Amazon, Apple etc I haven't found anything which they consider to be a valid play but I'm going to imagine it's pretty close to Spotify in terms of it being 30 seconds or more playtime.

Play Value

Every platform has country tiers that means tier one might be something like USA only while tier two would be Canda, UK and Tier 3 India etc. Each tier pays a different rate per play but we can also figure out roughly what the play value is. This value changes from month to month and comes down to two core factors.

At the end of the month the streaming service takes a portion of all paid subscriptions and ad revenue generated and divides that up across all value plays. Remember above a valid play is 30 seconds+ on a track listened to.

Based on this you get your payout per song play and it boils down to this.


I love a good info graphic so I put one together for you all. Here are the detailed numbers.

$0.01 = 1 Cent USD take note that a vast majority of these are under a cent.
Deezer - $0.0011 per play
Youtube Music - $0.002 per play
Spotify - $0.0032 per play
Amazon Music - $0.0041 per play
Apple Music - $0.0068 per play
Tidal - $0.0122 per play (Paid only service)

Now to make an kind of ok living in the USA you'd need to make roughly $36,000/yearly but even that's a rather low number after the crazy inflation but let's stick with that for now as it's an easier number to divide up.

That's $3,000 per month needed to hit those numbers or just shy of $100 a day.

Below is now many plays you would need to hit that goal broken down per day, month and year to give you a good idea of what it takes to make it with streaming revenue only.

ServiceDaily PlaysMonthly PlaysYearly Plays
Deezer89,6632.72 Million32.7 Million
Youtube49,3151.5 Million18 Million
Spotify30,821937,50011.25 Million
Apple14,504441,1635.29 Million
Tidal8,084245,9012.95 Million

With that chart you might be thinking to yourself. Why don't you just focus on tidal exclusively and maybe apple and forget the rest?

Well sure that would be great but the amount of people that actully use Tidal is very low and apple is a little bit on the lower side as well as they require paid subscriptions compared to something "freeish" like Spotify, youtube and deezer.

Also these rates charge based on revenue the platform is making and how many plays are happening. The numbers above are averaged out over 3 months of data I collected from my own channel which is pretty low. I'd say I touch close to 500 plays a day on spotify and the rest are around 100 or so. Long way to go for sure but we are getting there.

If you enjoyed this article you can show your support by following me on Spotify, Youtube and all those streaming platforms and give my songs a listen that helps in a massive way. Just search Valor Beats.



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3speak.tv pays the best!

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I could try putting my music up on there and see how it does. It would be pretty much double posting though it seems since the video gets published as well

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In 3Speak you monetize the same as a publication with the 7-day window and some factors apply to get a decent vote, such as at least 1 minute of video playback, the number of valid reproductions, and if you receive comments on said publication. But you should try.

Although I must say that I don't really like the fact that your videos are made with a single image that is unique for everyone. Maybe you should give those videos more life because the music is definitely excellent. Keep in mind that videos you post on other platforms are not considered original content for 3Speak if you decide to post it there, so I think you should post on 3Speak first and after payment take it to other video platforms. In addition, with Hive's interop, when you publish to 3Speak, you will no longer need to do it on any other frontend of our blockchain, since they will appear on each of them as a new publication.

You also have RisingStar where you can create your music NFTs and monetize them through the same game. It would be interesting to hear you in the background in one of the missions. You have a new subscriber in your network and I got here through ListNerds. Greetings.

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I could put some time into video animation but it's rather time consuming not sure the payoff there would be worth it for time input but I can give that a shot.

Risingstar seems interesting as well! I did try doing some version of NFTs here on hive a few months back but it seemed pretty dead but this "game" feels like it's pretty active.

Thanks for the deets and suggestions appreciate it.

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Gee that isn't very much is it, but $36000 to me would be a lot! I don't make music though. Still it is nothing like it use to be before the internet took over. valorbeats Your Spotify link isn't working for me but your YouTube link worked. Have a great weekend! Barb 😊 !BBH !CTP

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I'll give it a look as to why the spotify link isn't working thank you for brining it to my attention. Have a wonderful weekend as well.

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