Curious how much are other artists getting paid by Spotify?

If you’re an artist on Spotify, you likely already know how much the platform is paying out to you, but how does that compare to other artists. Here, we look at a breakdown of what some other major bands and artists are pulling down from the platform.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

You may already have your songs on Spotify, so you know how much you’re making from the statements you’re receiving, but that data you’re seeing might be more useful if you could compare it to other artists. Now there’s a tool that not only allows you to see how much popular artists get paid from the platform, but other data points like number of followers, monthly listeners, and popularity as well.

The tool is the Royalties Calculator and it’s useful on many levels. Let’s look at some of the results that I received after a brief trial.

As you can see, artists from different eras and genres have far different outcomes on Spotify. If the Calculator would have looked at Amazon Music, for instance, Blake Shelton might have gotten better results than Drake.

The way the calculator works is it takes the number of Spotify listeners for any artist, and calculates the estimated royalties based on the price-per-stream rates in this article, which in this case is $0.00318. That rate can be deceiving because it all depends on what territory the streams come from (different territories pay different rates) and the tiers they came from. That means that no two royalty payments will be the same even if they had an identical number of streams.

One of the most useful data points from this calculator is Popularity, which many artists sometimes have a hard time discovering. This is a measure of how much the Spotify algorithm is going to suggest artists and songs to users. In the case of the chart above, Drake has a 100% chance of being recommended while Duran Duran only has a 70% chance.

Beside the fact that these royalties are only estimates, it’s helpful to understand that this is just one platform that an artist can make money from. There are about 30 others world-wide, all which will pay an artist at least some money, although an artist will tend to find just one or two where he or she has the most popularity.

Overall, this calculator shows that there’s definitely money to be made from streaming, but you have to reach a moderate level of popularity to enjoy it. The amount that artists get paid from Spotify is just one piece of the puzzle.