Mildly Interesting

At bandcamp.com you buy the track or album and the artist gets about 85% of the money

Qobuz is missing and would be no. 1

Google Play Music hasn't been a thing since 2020. I doubt these numbers are accurate anymore.

ok, this is pretty outdated. I looked up around 15 different sites from the last 12 months, and is looks the common ground regarding payouts is like this:

1. Bandcamp $0.85-$1.00 (via sales)
2. Tidal $0.012-$0.015
3. Qobuz $0.0136-$0.022
4. Apple Music $0.007-$0.01
5. Deezer $0.006-$0.009
6. Amazon Music $0.004-$0.007
7. Spotify $0.003-$0.005
8. SoundCloud $0.0025-$0.004
9. YouTube Music $0.005-$0.008
10. Patreon (hybrid) $5-$50+ per subscriber

But there are some quirks with that list. Deezer for example, landing in the middle of the pack in general, has some rules since 2023 that are very pro-artist:

• Artists with at least 1,000 monthly streams from 500 listeners get double weight in the royalty pool.
• Streams earn more when a listener searches for your song than when an algorithm queues it up.
• White noise, rain sounds, and other non-music content came out of the pool entirely, so those royalties now go to actual songs.
• They are based in France, so the BuyEuropean crowd is also satisfied.

Spotify pays shit for single streams, but if you hit it big, you will also receive a lot more cash, making them more attractive for artist with an already existing fanbase.

Soundcloud on the other hand works pretty well to build up an fan base in the first place, during the time where you realistically can't expect to be living from royalities anyways.

Bandcamp is actually great if you are known enough to get album sales, but not known enough to hit big streaming numbers. (also known as "the bands that are probably worth listening to, while not being mainstream")

Patreon gives a steady income, but it also means more of an youtuber-style of life than an classic Musician - it puts you under pressure to put out content on a regular basis, and that is not every artists strength.

Wait... Napster still exists?

Except I have like 12k streams on Spotify and have never gotten anything from them. I have a small number on other platforms and have received at least something from them.

At least for Spotify you can't really set a price per stream as they use a fixed money pool all artist take from. The most probable reason behind that is so Spotify can commission their own music (or nowadays just generate it) which they then push to the front page so they can pay themselves and do not have to pay as much to real artists.

They were accused of doing just that in multiple occasions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify

This is far too outdated. OP should be ashamed. I wish Google play music still existed. Way better than YouTube.

What pisses me off about this was a video I saw on youtube a few years ago. Originally recorded from a twitch stream.

Snoop dogg was to be interviewed by some music promotion stream. He showed up 45 minutes late, and when the host was interviewing him, he asked why snoop was so late. To which snoop responded with something like "DAAAAMN! I'M HERE, AIN'T I??? DON'T WORRY WHY I'M LATE! YOU ASKIN STUPID QUESTIONS! I GET HERE WHEN I WANT TO GET HERE! THIS IS RIGHT ON TIME!!!! WE WENT TO GO GET CHICKEN! CAN'T A MAN GO GET CHICKEN???"

Then later in the interview they asked him about when he was going to release a new album. And he responded by going off on a rant about how albums don't make money. Then he started saying all he made from spotify from people playing Doggystyle (the album that made him famous back in 1993) was $42,000 in a month.

He was complaining about getting $42,000 from an album that came out almost 30 years prior at that point. All he did was grant spotify the right to stream his music. He didn't record new music. He didn't make some new project. All he did was sign a contract to make passive money from songs that were recorded a decade before most listeners were even born.

I lost all respect for him when he casually dismissed an entire year worth of some peoples pay, to be paid to him monthly, for doing nothing. He acted entitled that it wasn't enough. That it was insultingly low pay for a month of work.

As much as he's wrong to take that tone, I'm not defending spotify either. They've been caught, multiple times, creating fictional AI bands, so the small amount they do pay, they don't have to pay. The idea was to slowly push real artists out, and create new pop culture icons discovered through their app. Which they don't have to pay for ever.

I don't know what the plan is if ever their plan had worked, and people started demanding a tour.

Has anyone seen how AI-pilled Napster is now? Their home page makes me wanna throw up.

This is something that would really benefit from a bar chart because the numbers are wildly different and they aren't round enough for humans to easily handle.

Overly complicated industry presented as overly simplistic graphic gets tons of votes from uneducated denizens. More at 11.

To name one thing: each of these uses a different definition for what a stream constitutes.

You should see how much money artists make from the sale of a physical album - may as well be nothing. It all goes to publishers, distributors, execs, producers, marketers, and everyone apart from the artist. Decades ago when albums were AUD$30, about $3 of that made its way to the actual artist if they were lucky.

Artists haven’t made money from their music sales since long before streaming was a thing. They’ve always made almost all of their money from concert ticket sales and merchandise sold at shows.

While getting virtually nothing for all the times their music is streamed might seem bad, it isn’t looking at the whole picture. More streams = more fans = more concert ticket and merch sales. Streaming services are a net positive for artists overall.

How do you stream music from Google Play? I know that you can stream music with YouTube, but Google Play?

They pay this to the actual musician or to the publishers that will then give even less to the real artist?

Bandcamp (on which you can stream music): 100%

Ive been out of the loop for a long time, but Napster pays more than "reputable" services?

What a timeline

This info is outdated, Napster does not do music anymore. I spent five years using it, but last year more and more tracks started disappearing from the database, to the point the service was unusable, and when I went on their website to unsubscribe I saw they were no mention of music strraming, just their AI agents productivity stuff.