My Very First Streaming Earnings…

If you’re like me, then you’ve always wondered how much artists make when people stream their music on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. In order to accurately answer this question for you, I have literally spent years of my life writing songs, recording them, uploading them, and trying to figure out ways to get people to listen to them. I got some real numbers for you… and they may surprise you.

I felt the best way to present this information was visually and in a video format, so if you’d like to save yourself a bit of time, you can just pop over to my YouTube channel and watch the video. I promise, it’ll be fun.

In the video, I actually log into my DistroKid account, show you charts, graphs, and statistics… and then I explain how many dollars and cents are earned. But in lieu of you watching, I’ll do my best to just explain everything in text here.

Long story short? I started uploading music about a year ago, but never really paid close attention to the amount of money I was “banking.” Recently, I decided to cash out — but I wanted to keep it a surprise to myself, so I didn’t look at amount of the check that was being sent.

Spoilers: It was for $2.20.

Numbers Explained

I’m actually pretty sure that my total revenue was originally closer to $6, but it looks like they charged me about $4 to send me the physical check, leaving me with $2.20.

That’s from almost a year of streaming. My total profit is about $0.20/month. That’s awesome. A few times a year, I’ll be able to afford a gum ball.

So what contributed to these numbers? For starters, I don’t have the biggest fan base. My music has been streamed about 5000 times over the past 365 days. Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. Some streaming platforms pay more and some pay less. If all of my streams had been through Spotify, I could have expected to earn about $15… but there’s a catch…

Starting in 2024, Spotify decided they were only going to pay streaming royalties for songs that have had at least 1000 streams.

Guys, it’s not easy to get 1000 streams on a song.

Labors of Love

Even if you’re one of the lucky, top artists who can manage to get a million streams on a track, that still only equates to about $5000. This is clearly not a get rich quick scheme.

But that’s okay. Most of us don’t make music because we’re trying to get rich. We do it because we love to make music. And in fact… we actually pay so that people can listen to it. As I mentioned earlier in this article, I use DistroKid as my distributor. They have a fairly easy way to upload music and push it out to every streaming platform you’d ever want. It’s also pretty cheap, but if you use my referral link, you can get an additional 7% off. For everyone else, it’s usually $22.99/year.

If you’re paying close attention, you’ve done the math and noticed that the $2.20 I’ve made so far has not yet covered my DistroKid investment of $22.99, but that’s okay too! Everything in the music world costs money and I’m pretty good at recording on a budget.

Music Industry Revenue

In the video, I also analyze this giant chart of information provided by the RIAA.

You can view an interactive version of the chart at the RIAA’s website. I’ll spare you most of the analysis here, but the overall trend shows that music revenue has gone down a bit since the era of CDs.

---

---

Other Ways to Support

Not only is there a smaller amount of money in the market overall, but it actually seems like less of it is now getting paid to the actual musician. Is it really surprising that lots of smaller artists have some sort of other avenue where you can help support them like a merch page or a Patreon page?

(I’ve got a Patreon page, if you were wondering)

But if you’re not into the whole spending money thing, you can still show your support for free in some very simple ways.

1. Share music on your social feed. This helps get the word out to people who might otherwise never hear it
2. Like or heart songs when you hear them played on your streaming platform of choice.
3. Add songs to playlists you create that contain other, similar songs.

Have you ever noticed how when you get to the end of a playlist on Spotify, it keeps playing music? And it very often plays music that matches the same vibe of the songs that you were just listening to? Have you ever wondered how it accomplishes this task?

Spotify is comparing your playlist to everyone else’s. It pulls from thousands of other examples and tries to come up with the best selection of adjacent songs based on how other people group them and listen to them.

A lot of algorithms look at playlist data like this in order to determine how to suggest new music to people. By adding a smaller artist’s song to a playlist, you’re helping train the algorithm and making it more likely that someone new will hear their song.

Conclusions

I had a lot of fun with all of this. I hope you had fun as well.

Now go listen to some music. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, you can go check out my song, IO Pan!

Seriously, I never expect to get rich off of this stuff. I only ever just want people to listen. For all the people that listen… thank you! And if you ever decide to share some of my music with another person, then I am honored!

Hello everyone. We’ve reached your favorite part of the post: the fine print. There is at least one affiliate link in this post. Technically, with this particular affiliate, I don’t have to disclose that to you, but I’m still letting you know because it’s nice to know. You know what else is nice? When people listen to your music.