Answers/Glossary/Per-stream rate
Glossary · Royalties
Per-stream rate
A per-stream rate is the average amount a recording earned per play, calculated after the fact by dividing royalties received by streams delivered. It is an outcome, not a published price — Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music do not pay a fixed rate per stream.
Every artist wants a per-stream rate and no service publishes one, because under pro-rata allocation there is nothing to publish. The number you see quoted is arithmetic performed backwards: take the royalties a catalogue actually received, divide by the streams it actually got, and report the quotient. Change the month, the country mix or the platform's total volume and the quotient changes without anything in your deal changing.
The figure moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your music. A subscriber play draws on a pool built from subscription revenue; an ad-supported play draws on a much smaller pool built from advertising. A play in the United States divides a far larger pool than a play in India or Indonesia, because the pool is assembled from local prices. Across my own catalogue, 186,519 Spotify streams between 2019 and 2026 averaged $0.0033 per play, with US streams at $0.0039 and Indian streams at $0.00008 — one number, wildly different components.
Eligibility rules matter too. Spotify requires a track to reach 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months before it generates recorded royalties at all, so a catalogue full of very small tracks has an effective rate of zero on those tracks.
The misunderstanding: treating a headline per-stream figure as a forecast. It is a description of one catalogue's past, computed gross of distributor cuts, label shares and collaborator splits. Use it to sanity-check a statement, never to project income.
This is what my own data shows; your catalogue will differ, and I am not an accountant.
Related terms
- Pro-rata allocationPro-rata allocation is the method streaming services use to divide royalties: all revenue in a market and month is pooled, a…
- Royalty poolA royalty pool is the total sum of money a streaming service sets aside for rights holders in a given market and month, before it…
- Sound recording royaltyA sound recording royalty is income earned by the specific recorded master of a song, as opposed to the underlying composition.
- DSP (digital service provider)A DSP, digital service provider, is a streaming service or download store that licenses and delivers music to consumers —…
Answers that use this term
- Why Do Independent Artists Earn Less Than They Expect From Streaming?Two reasons, and only one of them is the per-stream rate everybody complains about. Per-stream payouts are genuinely small.
- How Streaming Royalties Are Actually Calculated (There Is No Per-Stream Rate)Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music do not pay a fixed price per stream.
Definitions on this site describe the United States system. I am an artist who has been through this, not a lawyer.
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