Spotify sets no price for a single play. Each month it pools what Premium subscriptions and advertising brought in. It keeps close to a third for itself and splits the remainder among rights holders in proportion to each one’s share of that period’s streams. A quoted rate is never fixed in advance. It is worked out afterwards, once the pool and the play counts are both in.
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That leaves the real question: if nobody sets a rate, what decides what a stream is worth?
Why the pool differs by market
Where a stream comes from matters, because streams from countries with high subscription revenue tend to pay more. Spotify itself charges unevenly: its French tier runs to €11.12 a month, against 129 pesos, or $6.44, in Mexico and R$21.90, about $3.88, in Brazil. A stream from the pricier market adds more to the local pool, and once that pool is shared out, it is worth more too. The listener’s plan matters too. Industry estimates put a Premium play at roughly three to four times the value of one from the free, ad-supported tier.
The company first laid out the split publicly in 2013, telling the BBC it kept 30% of what it earned from subscriptions and adverts and paid out nearly 70% in royalties. It said much the same again in 2021, through a transparency initiative called Loud & Clear. Whatever its exact deal with a given rights holder, Spotify pays out roughly two-thirds of every dollar the company makes from music. By 2020 that had added up to $5 billion paid to rights holders in a single year, and $23 billion since the company’s founding, according to the figures it gave Rolling Stone.
What a quoted rate actually measures
Spotify has never published a per-stream rate of its own. The figures that circulate come from analysts working backwards from real payout data. Billboard reported that the catalogue investor Duetti put the average master-recording royalty for independent artists at around $0.00341 per stream in 2024. Amazon Music’s average ran to $0.0088, Tidal’s to $0.0068, Apple Music’s to $0.0062 and YouTube’s to $0.0048. Spotify’s own figure sat lower, at around $0.003. Billboard attributed that to its scale, its geographic mix, its reliance on free and discounted plans, and Discovery Mode, a scheme in which an artist accepts a smaller royalty in exchange for playlist promotion. In a statement Billboard quoted, Spotify said a single per-stream figure is “out of step with” how the business runs. It said it would rather see listeners engage more and pay more than have the company judged on that one number.
One platform broke from the pattern. In 2025 the French streamer Qobuz became the first service to publish its own rate: $0.018732 per stream, recording and publishing combined, for the year ending March 2024. Qobuz’s deputy chief executive, Georges Fornay, called the disclosure a step toward “greater transparency.” Even Qobuz admitted the number was not a price it had set. Its own statement said royalties are “not systematically based on remuneration per stream” and that payment methods “vary from one contract to another.” A per-stream figure can also mislead in the other direction. The Guardian noted in 2015 that the rival service Beats Music paid more per play than Spotify chiefly because it had far fewer users, a gap that would close as its audience grew. The same analysis estimated that of Spotify’s roughly $0.006 to $0.0084 per-stream payout, a signed artist might see about $0.001128 of it once the label had taken its share.
What has to happen before a stream pays anything
Not every play earns money. A stream counts toward a royalty only once a listener has stayed on the track for at least 30 seconds, a threshold that shows up consistently in independent breakdowns of the payout system. Since early 2024, a track has also needed at least 1,000 streams in the trailing 12 months before it earns anything on the recording side. Spotify told Pitchfork that tens of millions of the roughly 100 million tracks on the service fall short of that line, together making up about 0.5% of the royalty pool. At the rate then in force, 1,000 streams a year worked out to around $3, often less than the minimum a distributor needs before it pays an artist anything at all.
The same announcement raised the minimum length required of “functional noise” recordings, such as white noise and ASMR tracks, from 30 seconds to two minutes. Under the old rule, a 100-track playlist of 30-second clips could out-earn a 10-track playlist of five-minute songs, even though both ran for the same 50 minutes.
Two royalties, and neither reaches an artist directly
A single stream generates two separate royalties, not one. Publishing typically accounts for about a fifth of what a stream generates, paid to the songwriter and their publisher for the composition, with the rest going to whoever owns the recording. Spotify pays neither the performer nor the songwriter directly. A promotional video the company built for Loud & Clear put it plainly: Spotify pays rights holders, such as labels, distributors, aggregators and collecting societies. Each of those then pays whoever they represent, after taking its own cut.
That structure is why two artists with identical play counts can see very different money land in their account. Rolling Stone reported some of that gap in numbers from the Loud & Clear launch. In 2020, Spotify’s top 500 artists by listener count averaged $3.7 million each in royalties, drawn from an average of 17.3 million monthly listeners apiece. Independent musicians distributing through services such as CD Baby and DistroKid averaged nearer 35,000 monthly listeners that year, and made $4,100 on average.
Pro-rata, and the model that pays differently
Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music all divide their pool the same way: by each rights holder’s share of every stream on the platform, whoever played it. Deezer and SoundCloud instead run a user-centric model, in which one listener’s subscription money is split only among the artists that listener actually played. An artist with a small, loyal fanbase can earn more per stream under that system than the same artist would earn under Spotify’s. Scale still decides the bigger number, though: Spotify has more listeners than any of its rivals, which is why most independent musicians still make more money there in total than anywhere else.
When Spotify tried transparency of a different kind in 2021, artists including Portishead and Beak’s Geoff Barrow and the singer Zola Jesus said the numbers changed nothing about where the money actually went.
