Drake Has Earned $100 Million From Streaming (So Far)

Canadian musical sensation Drake has been smashing a number of streaming records lately, and a recent look at some of the financial numbers have revealed the artist has thus far pulled down over $100 million from streaming services alone.

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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Who says that streaming doesn’t pay? Yes, it only pays a fraction of a cent per stream, but those fractions really add up, especially when streams are in the billions for an artist like Drake. You may recall that Drake smashed all the streaming records on both Spotify and Apple Music recently during the release of his latest album Scorpion. Thanks to the ever increasing number of subscribers on both platforms, the rapper has total more than 23 billion streams that has generated more than $100 million so far.

Just how much has Drake earned? Music Business Worldwide used an average figure of $0.005 per stream (it’s likely higher than that since Apple Music pays an average of $0.00735 while Spotify pays $0.00437), which means that the rapper has brought in around $115 million just from these two services alone!

One of the reasons why Drake has a lot of streams (besides the fact that he’s so popular) is the fact that he’s very prolific, with 168 songs available for streaming that all play into the total stream count. Given that it doesn’t cost a subscriber anything to check a track out, it’s easy enough for a popular artist to receive a lot of streams against his or her total catalog. For instance, Ed Sheeran is at 9.084 billion, Justin Bieber is just behind at 8.69 billion and Kendrick Lamar is at 4.589 billion streams just on Spotify.

Although there are a number of companies that provide streaming data, as does both Spotify and Apple Music, there are enough variables that no one ever seems to be sure what the real numbers are. That’s no different from the old days of albums sales when a hit record usually had a lot of different totals attached to it (Michael Jackson and The Beatles are just a couple of examples).

Still, there’s plenty of money being made from music streaming right now if you’re a superstar artist, but remember that the reported totals are not what the artist gets to keep. Chances are that Drake has a 50% deal with his label, so he’s seeing about half that $115 million, which is still a pretty good career’s worth of dough.