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.

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.