Find how much money any musician makes.

Streaming royalties calculator

Have you ever wondered how much an artist earns through streaming services such as Spotify?
This tool enables you to search through Spotify's content and find exactly this.

Algorithm

There is no easy way to know the exact amount of money an artist earns per stream—since no streaming service openly shares this information.
We have based our algorithm on the data from this article from Soundcharts.
Once we have the number of monthly streams from Spotify, we multiply the price-per-stream of each platform by the number of Spotify streams.
Disclaimer: The royalties of all platforms other than Spotify are just a projection on how much they would generate on them; it is not the real number.

Terminology

Some terms may be confusing. Here there are:

• Spotify followers: The number of followers that the artist has on the Spotify platform.
• Popularity: The artist's popularity is calculated from the popularity of all the artist's tracks. The value is between 0 and 100, with 100 being the most popular.
• Spotify monthly listeners: The number of monthly listeners that the artist has on the Spotify platform.
• Estimated earnings: An approximation of how much money makes through these platforms. The algorithm is detailed above.

How does it work?

The technology behind this web application bases on the following principles.

1. The artist is searched through the Spotify API. It looks for artists with a similar name.
2. When selected, other techniques are used to find the exact number of monthly streams.
3. Finally, the algorithm defined above is applied to find the earnings.

The Streaming Platforms

There are the following streaming platforms taken into account:

• Spotify
• Youtube Official Content
• Amazon Music
• Napster
• Tidal
• Youtube Red
• Apple Music
• Google Play
• Deezer
• Amazon Prime
• Pandora

In the paragrafs below we present each one of the streaming platforms and the differences between them.

Spotify

Spotify, despite being the largest streaming platform, they only pay an average of $0.00318 per stream.
As the majority of the streaming platforms, they don't publicly share how much the pay per stream. So this is just an approximation as explained before.

This means that an artist needs 314K monthly streams to earn $1000. This is a HUGE amount for the average artist.

Here, at Royalties Calculator, we enable you to approximate the earnings generated by any artist in Spotify, so don't hessitate to try it!

Youtube

Another major player in the streaming world is Youtube.
They have at least three distinct types of payments depending on the stream type:

• Youtube Red and Youtube Music Stream: In these services, they pay an average of $0.008 per stream.
• Youtube official artist's channels: For these services, pay an average of $0.00164 per stream.
• Videos monetized through Content ID: Here, they pay an average of $0.00087 per stream.

This means that an artist needs:

• 125K monthly streams to earn $1000 in Youtube Red.
• 609K monthly streams to earn $1000 in Youtube for artists.
• 1.1M monthly streams to earn $1000 in Youtube content ID.

Again, this platform, enables you to calculate the earnings generated by a musician in Youtube, so try it!

Amazon Music

Another major streaming player is Amazon Music.
As the other platforms, Amazon, don't publicly share the price-per-stream. This value approximates to $0.01196.

Taken into account this value, 83K monthly streams are needed for reaching the $1000 mark, the lowest so far, but still high!

Again, this platform, enables you to calculate the earnings generated by a musician in Youtube, so try it!

Napster

Another highly known streaming platform is Napster.

The 30 days free, $9.99/mo streaming platform known as Napster, has a price-per-stream of $0.01064, meaning that a number of 94K streams are needed for reaching the $1000 mark.

Royalties Calculator, make the process of computing the artist's earnings extremely easy.

Tidal

Another major platform is Tidal.

As Napster, Tidal also is a 30 days free, $9.99/mo streaming platform, with a price-per-stream of $0.00989, meaning that 101K streams are needed for the $1000 value.

This platform, make this process extremely easy to compute.

Apple Music

Apple Music , with more than 70M songs, real-time-lyrics, and custom playlists, is another major player in the streaming world.

Apple, has a price-per-stream of $0.00563, which means that 177.6K streams are needed for the $1000 mark.

If you want to know how much money an artist makes in Apple, use this platform.

Google Play

Google Play Music , now known as Youtube Music, is a music and podcast streaming service and an online music cabinet operated by Google, which is part of its Google Play line of services. The service was announced on May, 2011 and was publicly launched on November, 2011.

In 2020, Google announced that the service would begin phasing out in September. It was replaced by YouTube Music and Google Podcasts in December 2020.

This service, has a price-per-stream of $0.00551, which means that 181K streams are needed for the $1000 mark.

If you want to know how much an artist made on this platform, just type the name in the search bar.

Deezer

Deezer , is a service with an extensive music catalog. It was created in France in June 2006 by two men, Daniel Marhely and Jonathan Benassaya. It has 16 million users, and is available in 16 languages. It has a Free version (with advertising), a Premium version without advertising (320Kbps quality) and a HiFi version (with highest quality).

Deezer, has a price-per-stream of $0.00436, which means that 229K streams are needed for earning $1000!

If you want to know how much an artist made on Deezer, just type the name in the search bar.

Amazon Prime Music

Amazon Prime (formerly known as Amazon MP3) is a music streaming platform and online store owned by Amazon. The beta version was released on September, 2007. In January 2008 it became the first online music store to sell digital rights management from four renowned music brands: EMI, Universal, Warner Music and Sony BMG, as well as many independents. All music files were originally sold at a variable bit rate of 256 Kb per second in MP3 format without watermark. Licensing agreements with recording companies restrict the countries where music can be sold..

Amazon Music, has a price-per-stream of $0.00339, which means that 295K streams are needed for earning $1000!

If you want to know how much an artist made on Amazon Music, just type the name in the search bar.

Pandora

Pandora is a streaming radio service, available only in the United States and operated by Sirius XM Satellite Radio, who, in February 2019, acquired it for $3.5 billion in shares. Developed by the Music Genome Project, it is free and personalized and plays music based on the user's tastes.

In 2014, Pandora had about 76 million monthly users and about 70% of the Internet radio market in the US.

Pandora, has a price-per-stream of $0.00151, which means that 662K streams are needed $1000! Very high indeed!

If you want to know how much an artist made on Pandora, just type the name in the search bar.

At a glance

Inspiration and contact

I started this project because I asked this quesiton for an musician I recently knew. After realizing that there weren't any good alternatives, I decided to build the tool from scratch.
If you would like to contact me send an email to g.ferrate.c@gmail.com.

Gabriel Ferraté - 2021