Music streaming: the services that pay artists the best and the least

How much
reports a play on Spotify, on Deezer or on Apple Music to its
artists? This is the question attempted to answerDavid
MacCandlessand his teamInformations is Beautiful. In
cross-referencing different official sources and analysis reports, they
created a hierarchy of streaming services no longer in terms of audience
as we often see, but in terms of artist remuneration.

The first may surprise you as it comes from so far away! It is
Napster, which is far ahead of its competitors. If we trust
from the data, we see in fact that the legendary site, initially software
widely used by music pirates and now legal streaming service and
paying, pays the artists$0.0167 per reading.

Comparatively, YouTube, the worst student in this area, redistributes
only$0.0006 per reading. Apple Music, Deezer et
Spotify, the three behemoths of music streaming are fighting between
$0.0038 per readingfor the third and0,0064
dollar per reading for the apple platform.

These figures correspond to income calculated for artists not
signed. A second graph to be found below gives the figures for the
artists linked to labels and record companies, but the ranking remains
unchanged and the figures move very little.

Obviously, we must put these average payments into perspective and the
broadcast power. Each platform does not reach the same number of
pairs of ears. Thus, YouTube has a billion users where
Napster only has 5 million.

Another interesting view: the authors of the graph calculated how much
of views an artist needs to make per month to earn around $1,500. And
while it takes 2.4 million views on YouTube to wait for this
remuneration, only 90,000 are needed on Napster, compared to 230,000 on
Apple Music.

Not sure that this angle of view is enough to convince people to change their
musical plate-forms…