kristine thune illustration

Towards the end of June, I recorded a 10 song album of 30 second songs, called “the age of short attention spans” and released it on Spotify. It was both an exercise in placing musical limitations on myself and an attempt to overcome a musical funk/period of writer’s block. The main reason, however, was to personally see just how viable this streaming music service really is as a reliable source of income for musicians. 

Initially, I was going to participate in this experiment for a year, and present the complete findings at the end. However, the initial results were rather disheartening, and I felt I should release this data sooner. That, coupled with a recent trend of certain musicians, bands, and labels refusing to add their new albums to Spotify, or, as in the case of Taylor Swift, removing complete discographies altogether, now seems as good a time as any.

Long story short: Putting all your music up on Spotify isn’t really worth it for the long haul.

Long story less short: Whether you’re with a label or on your own, you’ll make far more with digital sales and commercial licensing than you would with streaming at this moment. However, if you have a solid, existing fanbase and need to raise some money for touring, recording, album pressing, or gear, and don’t want to go with the traditional crowd funding route of Kickstarter or Indiegogo, Spotify is a good short-term option.

STAT BREAKDOWN: In order to get my album on Spotify, I used Tunecore. It cost $29.99 to put the album online for one year. Every subsequent year costs $49.99.  After you pay that fee, you retain 100% of the sales revenue. It took about two weeks for the album to show up in Spotify.

For the month of July, I ended up with a total of 122,442 song plays. 

Sales are on a two month delay, so it wasn’t until October 6th that I found out how that number translated financially.

The total came out to $114.98 for the entire month of July. This means Spotify paid out an overall average rate of 0.000939 cents per play, far less than the suggested range of 0.005-0.007 cents per play that my initial research suggested.

Granted, this disparity might be due in part to quantity of listeners (my album mostly streamed by myself and a few friends & fans) as well as quality of listener accounts (mostly free spotify accounts played these songs, there were very few paid accounts streaming).

Also, this average was worldwide, however some countries were actually closer to 1 cent per play (Sweden, Finland, and Norway).

After the money shows up in your Tunecore account, there are three options for receiving your royalties. For a $3 fee, you can have a check mailed to you. For a $2.75 fee, the money can be sent to your bank with a direct deposit. Or it can be deposited into your Paypal account for no charge. More fun math, at the royalty rate I got, to pay for the check or direct deposit fee, I’d need an extra 3,000 song plays.

Also, remember these stats are coming from an album comprised of 30 second songs. If I had released an album of average length songs, the amount of streams possible in a day would have differed drastically. Let’s say they each song was 2 minutes, that’s closer to 30610 plays a month, which equals $28.74 a month. One month wouldn’t have even paid for Tunecore’s cost of putting the album online.  Then, if you think about the amount of time and money involved in really recording an album, (from buying gear, to renting a studio, to hiring musicians, sound engineers, producers, etc.) you can see that this is not a feasible, sustainable way for an artist to make a living.

FOR THE GOOD NEWS: Musicians can still use Spotify to their advantage! Take the story of Vulfpeck, a band from Ann Arbor, who released a silent album on Spotify, and managed to make around $20,000 in a two month period for an upcoming tour. If you’re trying to raise money for a tour or a new record, and don’t want to ask fans for money, you can ask them for their time instead. Maybe release an EP of 30 second tidbits of songs from an upcoming album, or create something unique and fun for your fans. If you have a solid fanbase and can get a few hundred or thousand to stream your album on repeat for a week, you can definitely raise some money towards your goal. Even at my rate of 0.000939 cents per play, if you can get 2000 fans to stream 600 times a day (that’s streaming approximately 5 hours a day) for two weeks, that’s over $15,000. Also, it appears that the more people streaming your album, the higher your royalty rate will be.

TL;DR IN CONCLUSION: Unless you have a hit song or album, you’re probably not going to be raking in the dough with Spotify. Even Taylor Swift, who was hitting about 11 million global streams a week with “Shake It Off” alone, only made about $496,044 for the entire year before removing her music (according to Scott Borchetta, the CEO of Big Machine). For a single individual, that might seem like a crazy amount of money. But if you take into consideration all the people involved in recording and producing that album, how large the label’s cut is, and studio space/equipment costs, ultimately the money she made from Spotify was only a small fraction of that amount. And sure, the music industry is pretty messed up, with gross disparities between what the major record labels take in and what the artists get, but that’s a topic for another day. 

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12” x 18” poster designed by Werewolf Girlfriend with shoes illustration by Kristine Thune. Hand printed in Los Angeles, CA by Dave Kloc. Signed and numbered by yours truly.