How much do artists earn on Spotify for 1M streams?
Clue: only listens exceeding +30 seconds are eligible.
Spotify, a globally renowned music streaming platform, offers artists the opportunity to share their music with a wide audience and get paid in return. With a worldwide reach and currently boasting 479 million monthly active users, Spotify compensates its artists based on the number of streams, utilizing a system known as Streamshare.
Compensation Per Stream
The more streams an artist accumulates on their tracks, the higher their royalties. Royalties are the monthly earnings paid to the creator of the music in exchange for the distribution of their work. Each month, artists receive payment from Spotify through distributors, with a three-month delay.
For instance, an artist who garnered 1 million streams in January and February will receive their earnings in April and May.
It’s important to note that only listens exceeding 32 seconds are eligible for payment.
Spotify and the “30-Second Rule”
With this condition in mind, it implies that artists will not get any revenue from their work until users have listened to — at least — the first 32 seconds, of their track.
However, the actual compensation varies, with numerous figures circulating. A label specialized in music distribution on streaming platforms mentions an “average payment of €0.0021 per stream for our artists. Therefore, 1 million streams on Spotify equates to approximately €2144, or roughly 500 listens to earn €1.” The specific compensation also depends on the contracts negotiated between individual artists, both big and small, and Spotify itself.
The Swedish giant primarily communicates using general figures. “Since its inception, Spotify has paid nearly 40 billion dollars in royalties to music rights holders,” as stated on the loudandclear.byspotify.com website, which aims to address criticisms of the company’s business model.
“in the era of streaming, fans do not pay per track. That’s why we don’t think a ‘per listen rate’ is a relevant figure to analyze. Like all other major streaming services, Spotify pays royalties based on an artist’s number of listens compared to all listens on the platform. It’s called ‘listen share’.” — by loudandclear.byspotify.com
This monetization model explains why intros have considerably shortened over time, to rapidly grab listeners’ attention, resulting in an evolution of the modern musical composition, and user.
“One in Five Listeners Skips the Song After Five Seconds”
It’s logical: to be heard, you must capture the listener’s attention from the very first notes and then do everything to keep them engaged until those crucial thirty seconds pass.
When you consider that one in five listeners — skips the song after five seconds because it doesn’t satisfy them… the idea is to try, in those 30 seconds, to convey as much as possible to retain the listener and earn compensation.
As noted by Christophe Pirenne, a musicologist and professor at UCLouvain, this approach is prevalent in many ultra-popular tracks, where the “hook,” the catchy melody, must come almost immediately. However, for most artists, they remain more connected to traditional forms of composition.
Catchiness Takes Center Stage
We shorten or eliminate intros. The vocals should arrive quickly, ideally with the chorus as the opening. A single word should come early in the song. So, we’re immediately into what will provide the most immediate and rapid pleasure, like most modern apps, stimulating a rapid endorphin release, and hooking the user onto an addictive experience.
“I think it’s the catchy aspect of the song that will be predominant, how people will integrate it, remember it, and want to sing it. It’s partly due to the structure of the piece itself. If the chorus, which recurs several times in a track, comes at the end of the song, it’s complicated,” Olivier Duerinckx, Music Coordinator for RTBF Radio.
This isn’t the first time in the history of music that technology has influenced its form.
When 78 RPM records arrived, allowing for about three minutes of music, popular music adapted to this format. It’s been a little over a century now that we’ve been creating songs designed to fit entirely on a medium, initially the 78 RPM record, and later the 45 RPM, and so on.
