Short answer: streaming services don’t pay a fixed amount per stream. They put the money they make from subscriptions and ads into a pot, pay roughly two-thirds of it to rights holders, and split that share by how much each song was played. On average, that works out to somewhere between a tenth of a cent and a cent and a half per stream, depending on the service. What reaches you as a musician then depends on your deal with your label or distributor.
This guide explains how that money flows, how Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, SoundCloud and the others differ, who takes a cut before you get paid, and why your own statement rarely matches the averages you read online. To turn the averages into a number for your own streams, use our free streaming royalties calculator.
Updated October 2026. Payout rules and figures below come from the services’ own pages and announcements; sources are linked in the text.
1. How streaming services pay: the royalty pool
Listeners don’t pay per song: they pay a monthly subscription for unlimited listening, or listen for free with ads. So streaming services can’t pay per play the way a download store pays per sale. Instead, most of them work like this:
- The pot: each month, the service adds up its subscription and ad revenue, country by country.
- The rights holders’ share: about two-thirds of that music revenue goes to rights holders. Spotify says it pays out “roughly two-thirds”, like every major streaming service.
- The split: that share is divided by streamshare. If your music made up 1% of all streams in a country that month, your rights holders get about 1% of the royalties paid there.
- The payout: the service pays your label or distributor (for the recording) and your publisher or collecting society (for the song). They then pay you according to your contract.
This model is called pro-rata, and it explains most of what artists find confusing about streaming money. Your “rate per stream” is just the result of a division: it goes up or down with the size of the pot (more paying subscribers, higher prices) and with everyone else’s streams. Spotify itself doesn’t pay artists or songwriters directly: every payment goes through a rights holder first.
2. How much each service pays per stream, on average
Because the rate is an outcome rather than a price, the figures below are industry averages, in US dollars, for the whole amount paid to rights holders (not what lands in your account). They’re the same ranges we use in our calculator, based on Ditto Music and Royalty Exchange data and last checked in August 2026:
- Tidal: $0.012 to $0.015 per stream
- Apple Music: $0.007 to $0.010
- Deezer: $0.005 to $0.007
- Amazon Music: $0.004 to $0.008
- Spotify: $0.003 to $0.005
- YouTube Music: $0.001 to $0.002
- Pandora: $0.001 to $0.002
A higher rate doesn’t mean more money overall. Tidal pays the most per stream but has a small audience; Spotify pays less per stream but, with by far the most listeners, it’s usually where the bulk of streaming income comes from. Rates are updated in our streaming royalties calculator, where you can enter your stream count and compare all seven services at once.
Each service also has its own rules:
- Spotify pays recording royalties only on tracks that reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months, from a minimum number of unique listeners (Spotify doesn’t publish that number). The rule has applied to all artists since April 2024 and is checked every month. Publishing royalties for songwriters aren’t affected.
- Apple Music has no free tier, which helps its average. In 2021 Apple told artists that it paid about one cent per stream on average and paid 52% of subscription revenue to record labels.
- YouTube Music pays from two sources: ads shown around music videos and subscriptions to YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $8 billion between July 2024 and June 2025. Its per-stream average is low, partly because so much of its listening is free and ad-supported.
- Deezer uses an artist-centric model (more on it below), so two streams of the same song can be worth different amounts.
- SoundCloud doesn’t publish a per-stream rate. Artists who monetize directly with SoundCloud are paid with fan-powered royalties: a listener’s subscription or ad revenue goes to the artists they actually listened to. You need an Artist or Artist Pro plan for this.
Services are also tightening the rules around fake streams and mass-uploaded tracks, which are taken out before royalties are calculated. If you use AI in your music, read what Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer and TIDAL now allow and pay for AI-generated music.
3. Pro-rata, artist-centric, fan-powered: why the model matters
The way a service splits its pot decides who gets paid, not just how much.
Pro-rata (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and most others) pools everyone’s money. Say a fan pays their subscription and only listens to your band all month. Under pro-rata, their money doesn’t go to you: it goes into the shared pot, and most of the pot goes to the artists with the most streams overall. Very heavy listeners and fraudulent streams also weigh more in the split than casual listeners.
Artist-centric is Deezer’s answer, built with Universal Music Group and launched in France at the end of 2023. It keeps a shared pot but changes the weights. According to Deezer’s own explanation:
- artists with more than 1,000 streams a month from at least 500 unique listeners get a boost: each of their streams counts double;
- songs that fans actively search for or find in non-algorithmic playlists get a boost too, and the two can stack, so a stream can be worth four times a non-boosted one;
- each user counts for at most 1,000 streams a month, which limits the weight of bots and extreme listeners;
- rain, white noise and other functional sounds are replaced by Deezer’s own content, which earns no royalties.
Fan-powered (SoundCloud, for artists who monetize directly with it) goes furthest: each listener’s money is shared only among the artists that listener played. For a small artist with a loyal audience, that’s usually the best deal, because your most dedicated fans pay you directly.
4. Who takes a cut before the money reaches you
Every stream generates two kinds of royalties, paid to different people:
- Recording royalties, for the recording itself (the master). This is the bigger part of the money. It goes to whoever owns or distributes the master: your label, or your distributor if you’re independent.
- Publishing royalties, for the song (lyrics and composition). They go to songwriters and publishers through collecting societies (PROs) and, in the US, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). Many independent artists never register for these. Our guide to music publishing royalties explains how to claim them.
How much of the recording royalties you keep depends on your deal. Spotify’s royalties guide describes the range: on a traditional record label deal, the label typically keeps the majority share in exchange for marketing, promotion and A&R; partnership deals can be closer to 50/50; and with a distribution service, artists keep nearly 100% of their earnings after the distributor’s fees.
Distributors charge either a yearly or per-release fee, or a commission on your royalties. On top of that, Spotify notes that distributors usually have a minimum withdrawal amount ($2 to $50), and banks charge transaction fees ($1 to $20). If you pay costs upfront, our free break-even calculator shows how many streams you need to recoup them.
5. What artists actually earn from streaming
Spotify publishes earnings by artist level every year, in its Loud & Clear report. For 2025, Spotify says it paid the music industry more than $11 billion, and that:
- more than 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify alone;
- more than 13,800 artists generated at least $100,000;
- the 100,000th highest-earning artist generated more than $7,300;
- artists who accounted for 1 in every 1 million streams on Spotify generated over $11,000 on average;
- roughly half of all royalties were generated by independent artists and labels.
Keep in mind that these are royalties generated for all rights holders, recording and publishing together, not what the artist took home after their label, distributor, publisher and co-writers were paid. And they come from Spotify’s own analysis. Still, they show how steep the curve is: the artist ranked 100,000th on Spotify generated about $7,300 in a year, before anyone took a share.
6. Why your payout is lower than the averages
If you divide your last statement by your stream count and get less than the figures above, that’s normal. The usual reasons:
- Where your listeners are: a stream from a country where subscriptions are cheap pays less than one from the US or the UK.
- Free vs. paid listeners: streams from free, ad-supported accounts pay less than streams from subscribers.
- The threshold: on Spotify, tracks under 1,000 streams in 12 months earn no recording royalties at all.
- Your share: the averages are the full amount paid to rights holders, before your label’s or distributor’s share and fees.
- Two separate royalties: your distributor statement only shows recording royalties. Publishing royalties arrive separately, if you’ve registered your songs.
- Timing: services pay rights holders monthly, but distributors report and pay on their own schedule, so recent streams may not show yet.
For a worked example on a single number, see how much 10,000 streams on Spotify are really worth.
7. Beyond streaming: where else musicians earn
For most independent artists, streaming royalties are one income among several, and rarely the largest at first. Streams matter beyond the money they pay, though: they’re how new listeners find you, and those listeners are the ones who buy tickets and merch.
- Live: concerts, tours and music festivals still bring in more per fan than streams, and build the fan base everything else depends on.
- Sync: licensing your music for films, TV, ads and games pays a fee upfront and royalties when it airs. See our guide to getting your music on TV.
- Publishing: if you write your own songs, register them with a collecting society and, in the US, the MLC, so you collect the songwriter side of every stream.
- Direct sales and merch: downloads, vinyl and merch sold to your fans pay far more per fan than a stream.
Whatever the model, streaming income grows with the number of people who listen to you, and that starts with getting your music heard. On Groover, you can send your tracks to playlist curators, radios and music media, and get a reply within 7 days or your credits back.
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