"How much will my song make?" is one of the first questions every artist asks — and the honest answer is "it depends". Streaming doesn't pay a fixed amount per play; it pays a share of a pool that shifts with the platform, the listener's country and your distributor. But you can still get a realistic range, and that's far more useful than the scary headline numbers. Here's how streaming pay actually works.
Short answer: per stream, you're usually looking at roughly $0.003–$0.005 on Spotify, more on Tidal and Apple Music, less on YouTube's free tier. Around 1,000 streams ≈ a few dollars. Real payouts are a range, never an exact figure.
Streaming royalties are paid pro-rata: each platform pools its subscription and ad revenue, then divides it among rights-holders by share of total plays. So your effective rate depends on things you don't control — whether the listener is on a paid or free plan, which country they're in (a stream in the US pays very differently from one in India), and the cut your distributor takes. That's why any honest estimate is a low–high range. A single exact number would be false precision.
Before you count on streaming income, see what your numbers actually translate to. It reframes "100,000 streams" from a fortune into a clear, sober figure.
The per-platform breakdown shows where your money really comes from — often a surprise — so you know where to focus promotion.
If a payout looks far off from a market-average estimate, it's worth a closer look at your distributor's rates and cut.
Want to cover a $500 mastering bill? Flip it around and see how many streams that takes — a grounding reality check for any release plan.
Once you've estimated the revenue, divide it cleanly between everyone who worked on the track.
Do that with the split calculator and export a signable split sheet.
There's no fixed rate. Spotify pays pro-rata from a revenue pool, so the effective per-stream figure typically lands around $0.003–$0.005, but it shifts with the listener's country, their subscription type and your distributor's cut. That's why a realistic estimate is always a range, not a single number.
Per stream, Tidal and Apple Music generally pay more than Spotify, while YouTube Music's free tier pays the least. But the platform with the most streams usually earns you the most overall, even at a lower rate — volume matters more than headline per-stream figures.
No. Streaming royalties are paid pro-rata — a share of each platform's pool — and depend on the listener's country, subscription type and your distributor. AudioKit uses market-average rates to give a realistic low–high range, not a guaranteed amount.