music_throwaway

If I had to guess, T-Pain's #s are encapsulating more regions than the US - everything I calc'ed was US-only. It gets really bad when you look at rates in emerging countries so I find it helpful to be very specific about what data is encapsulated in these rates.

Most importantly, while his title is not wrong, remember that this is not what it takes for an artist to make $1, it's how much money is paid out in aggregate for each recorded music stream. Artists make a smaller percentage of that amount, the label typically takes the lion's share.

Amazon's interesting because when you look at their premium tier, it's just under $0.01 / stream. But on a blended basis when you are include their ad-supported streams and their Prime Music streams, it's actually a bit more than $0.007 / stream so better than Apple.

I can't easily pull our Tidal numbers unfortunately.

I really respect your decision to choose your streaming service based on how they each pay out artists. I work for an independent label and the most recent analysis we did shows that in the US, Apple was paying out roughly just under $0.007 (7/10 of a penny) / stream, while Spotify was paying out around $0.004. These rates go down as you bring a more international user base, depending on where in the world the music was consumed. Of those payouts, depending on the clout of the artist, they're typically only seeing their 15-20% royalty of those payout rates on the recorded music side (music publishing is a different story). So it's even worse than it seems!

A big reason that Apple is able to pay out higher rates is they're fully a premium business model with no ad-supported tier (they have a free trial period though). Due to Spotify's ad-supported tier, artists are able to reach a more cost-sensitive consumer, but at a lower overall blended rate per stream.