We all know that royalty payout rates for artists from music streaming services are awful. We also know that, in many cases, labels and other companies they work with are taking a big cut of those already-small earnings.
Occasionally, we can lose sight of the weight of these facts in the abstraction of it all, but numbers don't lie. Today, catalogue investor and lending platform Duetti has published a music economics report wherein payout rates for 1,000 streams — with Spotify having introduced a new minimum annual streams threshold that demonetized all other tracks — were analyzed across data related to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, TIDAL, Qobuz, Deezer, SoundCloud and Pandora.
The study found that independent artists and others who own the rights to their master recordings made $3.41 per 1,000 streams globally in 2024, which is down from the 2021 global payout rate of $4.04. Of the platforms included, Duetti reported that Amazon Music was the highest-paying streaming service last year, paying artists $8.80 per 1,000 streams. (The best-paying one being owned by Jeff Bezos is quite the darkly ironic twist.)
Duetti CEO added that royalty rates appear to be plateauing due to the higher price of streaming subscriptions raising payouts, and earnings per stream are consequently stabilizing after years of decline. Another key finding highlighted in the study was that only 15 percent of the songs that "go viral" on TikTok actually see increases in payout rates.
Last May, Billboard estimated that Spotify specifically will pay songwriters $150 million less in 2025 thanks to its "bundling" of music and audiobooks with premium-tier subscriptions. The streaming platform just won the dismissal of a lawsuit over the move that lowered payments to artists, while Spotify's Music Business VP David Kaefer claimed that the company paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024 — and has made the world "value music."
While a $0.00341 per listen reward to someone for sharing their art doesn't really match up with most of our understanding of valuation, it also certainly isn't enough to sustain much of anything — except all of these high-level executives getting paid their fortunes, I suppose.