1 Million Plays On Spotify Will Earn An Artist

[lame54]

Approx: $4000

https://robertkaplinsky.com/work/how-much-money-do-you-earn-for-1000000-streams-on-spotify/

For those that are curious

[Delphinus]

1. Thanks

I wouldn't have known how to find that out.

[dpibel]

2. Which adds up fast

Per this Wikipedia article (too lazy to look for anything more reliable), each of the top 100 songs on Spotify has been streamed at least 1.2 billion times.

At $4K per million, a billion streams earns $4 million.

[multigraincracker]

3. not great a math but,

is that like 2 and half cents per play?

[dpibel]

6. $0.004 or 4/10 of a cent nt

[multigraincracker]

8. thanks

[lame54]

14. 4 1/1000 of a cent

[dpibel]

16. Four one-thousandths of a dollar

times 1000 = $4.00
times 1000 (i.e. $0.004 times a million) = $4,000

[lame54]

18. Recalculating...

Ok
Got it

[meadowlander]

11. Also most artists will have more than one song.

I imagine it's similar to YouTube where the people making bank are the ones with a large back catalogue.

[TheBlackAdder]

4. One makes $6600 for every million views on a monetized YouTube video. 2/3rds of a penny per view.

.

That doesn't included any embedded ad content the channel inserts to make more revenue.

.

[lame54]

15. Actually 7 1/1000 of a penny

[msongs]

5. and how much does spotify keep for itself? 99%? nt

[onenote]

7. $4000 more than they'd get for the same number of plays on broadcast radio

Not enough, but the real outrage is that broadcasters don't pay a penny to play recorded music.

[multigraincracker]

9. I had a friend that was a DJ

on a local Detroit Station that got fired for it. Called it Payola.

[dpibel]

10. BMI seems to disagree

https://www.bmi.com/creators/royalty/us_radio_royalties

"BMI uses performance monitoring data, continuously collected on a large percentage of all licensed commercial radio stations, to determine payable performances. This census information is factored to create a statistically reliable and highly accurate representation of feature performances on all commercial music format radio stations throughout the country.

"Royalties for performances of works in the BMI repertoire that occur on United States commercial radio stations will be paid according to the following rules:"

[ProfessorGAC]

12. We Paid An Annual Flat Rate To BMI...

...because 75% of our material was covers.
I'm thinking it was around $200 a year. But, since we were playing 75-80, $600-800 gigs per year, it seemed like a good deal to respect the copyrights.
I don't know that they would actually chase after club bands over it, but it seemed the right thing to do.

[onenote]

13. BMI pays the composer of the song, not the owner of the recording of the song.

There are separate copyrighted works in a recording of a song. There is the copyright in the musical composition (words and music). And there is a separate copyright in the recording of the song (the "sound recording" copyright).

BMI (like ASCAP and SESAC) is a "performing rights society" that represents composers. When a radio station plays Bonnie Raitt's recording of John Prine's Angel From Montgomery, BMI (or whichever performing rights society represents the current owner of the copyright in the song (Prine's estate or whomever the copyright may have been transferred to, such as a music publishing company) collects royalties from the station (typically as part of a "blanket license " ) and distributes payments to the owner of the copyright in the composition. But Raitt, or the record company that recorded her performance, get nothing from the radio station for the public performance of her recording of the song. That's because the Copyright Act recognizes a performance right in the musical composition but not in the performance of the recording of the song by a broadcast radio station). A 1995 amendment to the Copyright Act (the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995) gave sound recording rights owners a limited performance right for non-traditional broadcast radio plays, such as those on Spotify).

The radio stations claim that the recording artist/record company gets a benefit when a song is played on the radio and that should be enough. But one could make the argument that it is the radio station that gets the benefit from not having to pay to play the creator/owner of the recording.

[dpibel]

17. Thanks. I entirely defer to your expertise. nt

[krispos42]

19. Not bad for coasting on past work

Remember, a stream is just sending a prerecorded sound file over the internet. In many cases, these digital sound files were created years or decades ago.