Spotify payouts

[merlyn]

The two horses I was talking about were the long shot outside bet Music & Musicians (this is an old horse. Ancient might be a better description) and the plucky upstart newcomer, the odds-on favourite, Unbridled Corporate Power.

[amanise]

That's certainly how it feels. I think a good part of it from my perspective is just that I have no clue whatsoever of what's going on in the current landscape. I just don't understand it. What I recognize is an industry with clear gateways, albeit arbitrarily guarded by dodgy A&R 'professionals'. Labels, publishing deals, recording deals - PR - stuff like that. Now we can all make a track, pay a few denarii, and be released (like a salmon par) into the giant reservoir of the Interweb. Where we promptly starve unable to find sustenance or a mate.

Or, if your prefer space analogies, being sucked out of the airlock before we've had a chance to read our helmet manual.

I have as much chance of being picked up by passing aliens, as being played on the streaming platforms. But - does anyone have a clue what's going on? I'm pretty sure from this discussion, that I'm not alone. But I'm in it to win it, just got looked over for the Mercury again this year, that's all. It's all to appease the North East.

[Drew Stephenson]

I think it's good that you're sharing this as other people can see the (lack of) return from Spotify. What is a bit surprising is that after all this you're still using business language like "marketing and reach" when so far that has done you absolutely no good at all. We have to recognise the inevitable logic of the market when swearing on Threads is a good return on capital expended. Go market!

I'm using that language because those are the common terms. Not sure what you'd suggest instead?
As to the return on investment, the last three month's payments have now covered my Distro costs (as they did before Spotify changed the goalposts), so that was my first objective covered.

My question would be what was your goal? You write, perform, record, mix, master, upload, promote and market (whew) your music. What did you expect to happen?

Goal(s): have some more people listen to, and hopefully appreciate, my music.
In doing so cover my distro costs and potentially build a bit of pocket money.
Build up enough of a set of online numbers that potential gig bookers or other bands will give things a look / listen.
Expectations: Less than what's actually happened. I hoped to get back to covering my costs over the year and getting a few new listeners. The former is done and my listener numbers have increased by 40 fold. If that happens again over the next 12 months I'd be ecstatic!

Forgive my blunt intrusion here, but if someone doesn't like the way spotify pay out (or don't pay out, as it were), then why use it at all?

Because, unless you are a megastar who can make the people come to you, you have to go where your listeners are. For me that's overwhelmingly on Spotify. Whilst I make my music for myself, it's nice to have it heard.
The other aspect of it is as a storefront - if you mention 'streaming' in the UK, people overwhelmingly think of Spotify first. It's where bookers look, it's what Festivals ask for, and it's what other bands look at if they're considering you as a potential support act.

Most people seem to agree that Bandcamp has the fairest payouts (is that still the case, by the way? I may just try and earn thruppence ha'penny with some of my own musical drivel), so shouldn't we all stick with the good guys?

Bandcamp are a great sales platform, and they're my first choice for links and promotions, but they're a sales platform not a streaming platform. As BRX mentions, Bandcamp is largely a service for musos.
I think the less mainstream your music then the more powerful Bandcamp is - my stuff is right down the middle of the road and as a result I think I'm now getting more money from Spotify than Bandcamp.
Even if it is still the square root of FA.

What about Youtube Music?
I seem to recall a few people like Chords of Orion (ambient guitar) saying it worked quite well for them.

Youtube Music is interesting, and confusing. Youtube and Youtube Music have different payout rates and different technical rules around things like max LUFS. YT pays lower than Spotify and has much higher minimum thresholds, YTMusic pays higher and doesn't appear to have any minimums. But I'm never sure whether a link I create or follow is clearly one or the other or how to even get a YTM link from my standard YT dashboard.

[sc1460]

That's certainly how it feels. I think a good part of it from my perspective is just that I have no clue whatsoever of what's going on in the current landscape. I just don't understand it. What I recognize is an industry with clear gateways, albeit arbitrarily guarded by dodgy A&R 'professionals'. Labels, publishing deals, recording deals - PR -

A depressing thread, but you’ve painted a rough picture of the operating model of the music industry. They aren’t all dodgy btw, those roles are key roles but they’ve changed/evolved with the tech revolution, but they’re all hungry and if they don’t select artists with payback they will stay hungry.

The problem I think is that self-publishing is the opium of the music masses. The platforms were really built for scale and big labels. The self-publishing myth is to lure musicians to build an asset base for the platforms and their shareholders. Think about it, every song on soundcloud is worth near-zero, so how come the platform is valued over a billion? SOS offering its platform services is the same thing, asset building for the shareholders through a large customerbase. Spotify is a devil, but it is an instrument because effectively its payment terms were agreed by the top 3-5 labels representing their artists and set for everyone else.

I debated this with Ken Scott (of all people) at real world studios event, that behind the scenes nothing has really changed in the music industry, you still need a network of people around you to promote you and your music. Indeed one might say that without a manager, an agent, a promoter, a social marketer, an artist will likely remain unknown.

A record label guy I met down at Tileyard says a label needs a budget of £250k minimum to expose a new artist in the pop mainstream. That’s just to expose them. How much do you think they’ve spent to date on Lola Young. Or Wet Leg. And they’ll only take that artist on if they’ve already built a small social following, is productive songwriter and can be trusted to deliver back on the investment.

If you’re of an older generation, it’s going to be nigh on impossible possible to get funded, or get a deal, so why not help other artists instead? Teach them what you know about music, mixing, production etc make money that way

People think music is only art. It’s not really, it’s a business product like any other. Sad but yeah….and now it’s as commoditised as hell. I went to a songwriters event, a hundred+ songwriters turned up with laptops and Ableton. A 100 songs were written that day and uploaded! Geezus…

There’s one thing: Keep networking, or do a masters to increase contacts, get a tour arranged, if the black book of music contacts isn’t growing, then the music won’t reach many, regardless of how good it is.

Can anyone really be successful working on their own?
Cheers
H

[Drew Stephenson]

+1 to all that.

[amanise]

That's certainly how it feels. I think a good part of it from my perspective is just that I have no clue whatsoever of what's going on in the current landscape. I just don't understand it. What I recognize is an industry with clear gateways, albeit arbitrarily guarded by dodgy A&R 'professionals'. Labels, publishing deals, recording deals - PR -

A depressing thread, but you’ve painted a rough picture of the operating model of the music industry. ...

The problem I think is that self-publishing is the opium of the music masses. The platforms were really built for scale and big labels. The self-publishing myth is to lure musicians to build an asset base for the platforms and their shareholders. ...

.. behind the scenes nothing has really changed in the music industry, you still need a network of people around you to promote you and your music. Indeed one might say that without a manager, an agent, a promoter, a social marketer, an artist will likely remain unknown.
...
...
Can anyone really be successful working on their own?
Cheers
H

Thanks very much for sharing your insight H, a lot is as I suspected, and it certainly does feel like not much has changed behind the scenes.

You correctly identify that I'm of an older age group - which means that (thankfully) things are different for me now than they were when I started out - or than they are for todays young blades. The up front investment required alone makes older people with limited time left to bring a return on all that up front investment is always going to act against them (us). So it's a good job we all stuck with our day jobs and came out with our pensions.

I guess a lot of us (particularly those of us who have stuck with it as a life long past time) still harbor romantic ideals about being able to indulge ourselves in our 'art' - and get enough financial reward for our outputs to break even on the stuff we have to shell out for to be able to do it at all. But if we didn't have those romantic (deluded?) notions - most of us would have given up completely years ago. There are plenty of people who would say that the grown up thing to do would be just that, but something still keeps us going.

And then there's all that stuff about that there's already enough music in the world to last until the end of the universe three or four times over if played end to end and all that sort of thing. But still we keep going.

I disagree that this is a depressing thread. Realistic, yes, but it doesn't depress me - at one time it would have though. Maybe I'm just starting on the growing up part, but just haven't got very far along that road yet. I got to that bit just in time to be able to blame it all on the robots.

It's very rare to get any insight at all from any industry insiders, so thanks again for yours, hugely appreciated.

[Drew Stephenson]

Following James P's advice I've managed to get a bit more data from my distro and that throws a bit more light, and a bit more confusion on things.
I've done a bit of digging through the 3000+ rows of data and have established that for most streamers, the amount per stream varies by territory and by month, but not within the month. So a UK stream in January may net you £0.002 and a stream in February might get you £0.003, but all your other streams in February will also be at the same rate.
For Spotify it is much more complex, a stream of the same track, in the same territory, in the same month might not just be paid out at two different rates (as suggested by the idea that Free memberships pay a different rate to premium ones) but at up to SIX different rates.
So one of my tracks last month could have earned me any of
0.005979568
0.005565767
0.004817082
0.002919984
0.002474071
0.001557551
per stream. (Naturally 97% of them were at the lowest rate... )

This suggests there is something more complex than just a simple Free / Premium split going on.
It's all just curiousity now but anyone any suggestions?

[amanise]

I'm wondering about if these are different rates from streams in different regions? Or, something to do with synch licensing?

[Drew Stephenson]

Nope, all from the UK.
Don't see how sync licensing would have any impact on this?

[amanise]

I'm not really that sure myself, but, unless I'm mistaken a sync license agreement enables the passage of material from one licenced outlet to another? Like usage by a music library, or TV sound? Movie sound library? You might find a track pops out being used for something quite different than your original release targets? That probably a misinterpretation or an oversimplification. But, if not, I can imagine different 'syncs' offering different rewards. But x5? Sounds extreme.

I wouldn't be surprised if different artists get different rates, or more downloads end up with you getting a pay rise. Not something I'm in danger of.

[Drew Stephenson]

Hmm. That's not my understanding at all. A sync licence is for use with video - that's what someone pays for if they want to use your work as a soundtrack, Spotify shouldn't be getting involved in that at all.

I wondered if, since they have different rates for free and premium, whether they also have different rates for individual, family or duo memberships as well.

[amanise]

It's one of those things I used to sign up to with CD Baby without really understanding what it does. Now, it turns out, the most streamed track I ever made is one which records numbers in the thousands against a line called "Facebook Music Library". It's the oddest thing ever - so unexpected, and the last track I'd have expected to be listened to at all. But that must be the sync licensing at work. It's responsible for about 4 of the 8.5 dollars that CD Baby owe me right now, which has taken about 6 years to accrue. My payment threshold has been raised to $30.00 though.

Get in!

I wonder if you get paid more every time a Spotify Premium user streams a track?

[junkmale]

ey up Drew - this from the AI Darwin Awards website, https://aidarwinawards.org/nominees-2025.html might have something to do with some of the issues you've been having

The Innovation

Enterprising fraudsters discovered the perfect collision of artificial intelligence and streaming economics: AI tools could generate vast quantities of 'music' faster than Spotify could detect it, whilst the platform's royalty system would dutifully pay out for any track streamed longer than 30 seconds. This created what economists might call 'the perfect spam economy'—where algorithms generate content, algorithms recommend it, and algorithms pay for it, all whilst human artists watch their royalty payments get diluted by an ocean of artificial meditation music and counterfeit celebrity tracks.

The Scale of Ambition

The scope of this AI-assisted fraud was genuinely breathtaking: 75 million spam tracks removed in just one year, rivalling Spotify's entire legitimate catalogue of 100 million songs. These weren't amateur efforts—scammers deployed sophisticated strategies including 'impersonations, ultra-short tracks and mass uploads of artificial music' ranging from meditation instrumentals to deepfake versions of famous artists. The operation was so comprehensive that Deezer reported 28% of all daily uploads were fully AI-generated, creating what industry experts might diplomatically call 'an authenticity crisis.'

The Economic Genius

The beauty of this scheme lay in its elegant simplicity: every stream exceeding 30 seconds generated royalties, meaning scammers could upload thousands of AI-generated ambient tracks, meditation music, or counterfeit versions of popular songs and collect payments whilst legitimate artists saw their revenue diluted. The most notorious example was 'Heart on My Sleeve,' featuring AI-generated vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd, which demonstrated how artificial intelligence could create convincing impersonations of real artists and monetise their stolen voices.

The Streaming Platform Response

Spotify's response revealed the remarkable challenge of policing artificial creativity: the platform had to develop AI systems to detect AI-generated spam, creating what philosophers might call 'recursive artificial intelligence conflict.' The company implemented a spam filter to identify fraudulent uploaders whilst simultaneously welcoming legitimate AI-generated music, proving that distinguishing between 'good AI' and 'bad AI' requires the kind of nuanced judgment that humans struggle with, let alone automated systems. Meanwhile, the case of Velvet Sundown—an entirely AI-generated 'band' that accumulated over a million monthly listeners before revealing its artificial nature—demonstrated that audiences couldn't necessarily tell the difference either.


Why They're Nominated

This represents the perfect AI Darwin Award scenario: criminals deploying artificial intelligence to systematically defraud creative industries at unprecedented scale, whilst streaming platforms scramble to deploy more AI to combat the AI fraud, all whilst human artists suffer the economic consequences. The scammers achieved the remarkable feat of creating an artificial music economy that threatened to overwhelm the real one, proving that when artificial intelligence meets natural greed, the results can be both technically impressive and morally bankrupt. The fact that 75 million fake tracks could infiltrate a major streaming platform demonstrates either spectacular overconfidence in AI-generated content detection or a business model so focused on quantity over quality that it took years to notice nearly half their catalogue might be artificial. Either way, it showcases the perfect storm of AI capabilities being used for precisely the wrong reasons by precisely the wrong people.

[Drew Stephenson]

Well, yeah it explains why Spotify have their minimum thresholds (to an extent*) but it doesn't explain the range of payments when all the variables are taken into account.
I've tried to speak to Spotify about this twice but they refuse to answer the question and just close down the conversation. My distributor says that they just pass on the money and data that's provided to them - which makes sense, I'm not paying them enough for them to do anything else!

* The thing about Spotify's minimum thresholds is that they're they kind of numbers that are easy for bots to hit (see the post above) but difficult for real people to reach. So they're either stupid controls or deliberately disingenuous ones.

Anyway, I've given up on this, my curiousity has been exhausted.

[Drew Stephenson]

Typically, having said I was giving up on this, I have just had a response from my distributor to a ticket I raised a week ago that's been escalated.
They've now confirmed that,
A) Premium and Free streams pay at different rates (which James and a few others of you knew already).
B) Different promotional campaigns running during the month pay out at different rates. I'm guessing this means that if your track is added to a playlist or an artist mix or a recommendation mix it could all trigger different rates.
C) There is an 'algorithmic distribution of the overall royalty pool'. Which is a lot words that actually tells you nothing.
So I've asked for more clarity on C and also how my distro audits the payments they receive from Spotify to make sure everything is above board.

I'll update (probably in a week or so at this rate) if I hear back.

[James Perrett]

Thanks for your persistence on this Drew. Of course, what we all want to know now is how do we get the highest rate? I must admit to being surprised when I saw that some streams were earning as much as 1/2p each - if we think of that in old money then we've gone from earning a farthing a stream up to earning a full penny per stream.

[Drew Stephenson]

Looking back through the data, it appears that as my listener numbers have grown, the proportion who are on the free tier has grown hugely. Hence the fall in my payout rate.
At the same time, Spotify's premium subscriber numbers have grown, so it's not that they're losing premium members.
Which suggests that the Spotify's algorithms (which is where most of my listenership comes from) are pushing my music predominantly to their free tier.

Which, if this is anything other than a random anomaly, is a bit odd, strategically. It's not like it's saving them money (as most of my streams are not eligible) and you'd assume that you'd be wanting to push the big artists as a way of encouraging people to sign up?

My listener numbers are currently collapsing so it'll be interesting to see if that results in a swing back to more premium plays.

[EDIT]
Hot off the press I have a little more detail about 'algorithmic split':
- Whether the listener actively searched for your music vs. finding it on a playlist.
- How much of the track was played.

This last one makes sense with the correlation with increased listener numbers - if my track is being algorithmically pushed to more new listeners there's probably a higher chance of a 'miss' so they're more likely to skip on before the end of the track.

[amanise]

Sounds also like Spotify wants to incentivise musicians to get their fan bases to adopt a premium subscription. This would make sense for artists with big fan bases, but is meaningless to new starters. But big names should be able to call the shots a bit. They've earnt it, haven't they?

[James Perrett]

...
- How much of the track was played.

This last one makes sense with the correlation with increased listener numbers - if my track is being algorithmically pushed to more new listeners there's probably a higher chance of a 'miss' so they're more likely to skip on before the end of the track.

They had a big problem with bots that were only playing a track for sufficiently long to qualify for a payout. I think that time was previously 30 seconds but I guess that their accounting is more sophisticated now.

[Drew Stephenson]

Yep, 30 seconds still counts as a 'play' from a stats perspective but obviously doesn't translate into a full royalty payment.

Somewhat ironically I had another warning about 'suspicious streaming activity' again today, my second in a month (from different distributors). The ironic bit is that I've had these warnings at the same time my actual listener numbers and plays are plummeting (down 50% in the last 2-3 weeks) and are about 1/3 of what they were in the summer.

I obviously need to find some better bots!

[James Perrett]

I obviously need to find some better bots!

Apparently Tegan's grandma was going to stream our song 24 hours a day until I told Tegan to warn her that they might think she's a bot

[Drew Stephenson]

Maybe this is a simulation and we're all bots?