Most musicians know streaming pays badly. Fewer have sat down and done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is worse than the vibe.
This is not a hit piece on Spotify. The numbers below are drawn from Spotify's own published figures and widely reported industry averages, and the model they describe is roughly the same at every major streaming service. The point is not that one company is uniquely bad. The point is that the model itself cannot pay a small artist, and no amount of hustle changes that.
The per stream number
A stream pays somewhere between 0.003 and 0.005 US dollars. In sterling that is roughly a third of a penny.
Spotify pays out around 70% of its music revenue to rights holders, which sounds generous until you follow where it goes. That money reaches labels and distributors first. What arrives in your account is whatever is left after everyone in the chain has taken their share.
So the third of a penny is the optimistic figure, before anyone else has been paid.
The threshold nobody talks about
Here is the part that changes the picture completely, and it is the part most artists find out about after the fact.
Since April 2024, a track has to reach 1,000 streams in the previous twelve months before it earns any royalties at all. Not reduced royalties. None.
Below that line your track is not underpaid. It is unpaid.
Spotify's defence of this is that tracks in the 1 to 1,000 stream range were generating around 0.03 US dollars a month each, that the administrative cost of paying out sums that small exceeded the sums themselves, and that 99.5% of listening happens above the threshold anyway. As an operational argument that is coherent.
As an artist, what it means is simpler. If your track does 900 streams this year, you earned nothing. Not three pounds. Nothing.
What that looks like on a real track
Say you release a track and it does respectably for someone without a marketing budget. Two thousand streams in a year, which is a genuinely decent result for an independent release with no playlist placement.
At the optimistic end of the range that is roughly 10 US dollars. Before your distributor's cut. Before tax. For a year of a track existing in the world.
Now here is the same track on a store. One person hears it, wants it, and pays 4.99 for the file. On our Studio plan you keep 4.84 of that.
One buyer. Not two thousand plays.
To match that single sale through streaming you would need somewhere around 1,600 plays of the same song, and you would need to clear the 1,000 stream threshold first before a single penny of it counted.
| Streaming | Selling the file | |
|---|---|---|
| Paid per play or per sale | About 0.003 | Your price |
| Minimum before you earn | 1,000 streams a year | None, the first sale pays |
| What 2,000 plays is worth | Roughly 10 dollars, before cuts | Not applicable |
| What one sale is worth | Not applicable | 4.84 on a 4.99 track |
| Who sets the price | The platform | You |
The distributor takes another slice
There is a layer above this that makes it worse. To be on streaming at all you generally pay a distributor, either an annual fee or a percentage.
So the sequence is: pay someone for the right to be listed, wait to clear a threshold that most tracks never clear, and then receive a share of a fraction of a penny per play. On a track that does under 1,000 streams a year, you have paid for the privilege of earning nothing.
That is not a bad deal. That is an inverted one.
What streaming is actually for
We are not going to tell you to leave streaming, and it would be bad advice if we did.
Streaming is discovery. It is how people find you, how they check you out after seeing a clip, how your name gets passed around. It is a shop window, and a shop window that reaches most of the planet is worth having even when it sells nothing directly.
The mistake is treating the shop window as the shop.
Streaming is where people find out you exist. It was never built to be where you get paid, and the 1,000 stream threshold is the clearest possible statement from the platform itself that for most artists it is not going to be.
Selling the file
The alternative is not complicated, and it is what musicians did for about a century before streaming existed. Someone wants your track, they buy your track.
On Audibase that works like this. You set your own price. Free listeners hear a preview you control, either a section you choose or the whole thing at lower quality. A buyer gets the full file, at full quality, with no tag on it. You keep 85% on the free plan, 92% on Pro and 97% on Studio, and that percentage covers card processing, so nothing else comes out afterwards.
There is no threshold. Your first sale pays. There is no annual fee for the right to be listed. And the money reaches your Stripe account at the moment of the sale rather than on a reporting cycle months later.
Do both
The sensible position is not either or.
Put the track on streaming for reach. Sell the file to people who want to own it. The two do not conflict, nothing on Audibase is exclusive, and plenty of people find an artist through a playlist and then buy the track because they actually wanted it.
Just be honest with yourself about which of the two is the shop and which is the window.