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How Much Does Amazon Pay Per Stream?(Explained & Answered)

Pay per stream of all streaming services:

Useful articles + tools for royalties:

If you’re a musician, understanding streaming royalties and how they are paid is crucial for making the most of your income and setting realistic long-term goals. In this article, we spent hours diving into the statistics behind Amazon and how much they pay per stream. Want to know how much Amazon will pay per stream in 2023? You’re in the right place.

How Much Does Amazon Pay Per Stream? (TL;DR)

Amazon pays between $0.004 and $0.008 per stream in the US. However, it pays different amounts per stream depending on the Amazon Music account location, the content type being streamed, and the terms of the agreement between Amazon and the label/artist/rights holder.

As you’ll find out in this article, streaming royalties are much more complicated beasts than that, and it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact payout per stream rate. Market conditions and license agreements might affect the amount paid per stream by music streaming services.

We need to factor in that the money streaming services pay to musicians and rights holders are often divided among many people, such as the record company, the distributor, the publisher, and the artist themselves.

Therefore, the precise amount an artist or songwriter earns each stream can vary greatly depending on the details of their respective contracts.

Pulling out stats from Q2 2022, Amazon Music occupies 13.3% of the total streaming pie diagram, putting them behind Apple Music and Spotify.

The top-paying streaming services per stream (on paper) are Napster and Tidal with $0.01682 and $0.0128 per stream payouts respectively. While Amazon, which pays $0.00402 per stream to an artist, it’s not even close.

However, you need to take into consideration that the percentage market share and total subscriber base play a great role in how much an artist can make on a specific platform.

How Can You Calculate Your Amazon Music Streaming Royalties?

‘The Amazon Music Royalties Calculator’ is a free tool that uses the current royalty rates for on-demand streaming on Amazon Music in the United States. The calculator figures out how much money the artist will get based on how many times the song is played or streamed. Amazon Music Unlimited pays $0.00402 and Amazon Music HD pays $0.00735 per stream.

Musicians and songwriters can use this calculator to estimate their earnings from tracks on Amazon Music and devise a distribution strategy accordingly. If you want to optimize the earnings from your music on Amazon Music and your career as a musician, the Amazon Music Royalties Calculator is a great tool for you to use.

However, the catch is that this only works for US streaming numbers. It doesn’t take into account the worldwide streaming of your tracks. Solely based on the paid subscriptions in the US, the calculator is a good way to start thinking about royalties, but as far as professional analytics goes, this is just the tip of the iceberg!

We’re going to dive deeper into the statistics of a real track undergoing worldwide distribution via Amazon music to understand the average payout per stream more deeply. But before that, we need to understand the variables that affect your per-stream payment.

What Factors Affect Your Amazon Music Royalty Rates?

As we said, there are many factors affecting your per-stream rate.

The amount Amazon Music pays you per stream depends on these primary factors:

  • The country the song was streamed in
  • The overall number of streams on Amazon Music in that country per month
  • Number of subscribers in that country
  • Price of Amazon Music or Amazon prime in that country
  • Advertising revenue in that country
  • Subscription type (free tier listener / Amazon Music Unlimited/ Amazon Music HD listeners)
  • Distributor/label agreement with the artist

Geographical Location Of Your Subscription:

For example, in the current price hike of Sept. 2022 on Amazon Prime subscriptions (which include music), there has been almost a 14 percent increase in subscription rates in various European countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.

The monthly fee in the UK and Ireland, for instance, has increased to $10.96, which was previously $9.63. The difference between the $8.99 American price and theirs is almost 19-20%.

These costs are far higher than the average monthly fee in some of the cheapest regions to access Prime Video, such as Turkey, where the fee is less than half a dollar!

Because Amazon generates more subscriber money in the UK, your streaming rewards would be substantially bigger if you had a million streams in the UK and Ireland rather than a million streams in Turkey. This means that the streaming share is distributed across a bigger total amount of streaming money.

Is Your Music Heard With Ads or Without?

It’s the same with commercials. Listeners on Amazon Music Free get access to fewer features and are inundated with ads. Advertisers fund Amazon’s free tier, and since they’ll put their money where they think they’ll get the best return, that means less money from countries with less-expensive subscription rates.

The streaming of an Amazon Music HD subscriber is more valuable than the streaming of an ad-supported subscriber as Amazon’s premium user subscriptions are more profitable than its advertising revenue on Amazon Free.

You can expect more earnings from a premium user base compared to a free user base.

If all of your fans subscribe to Amazon music HD, your earnings will look much more different, even with the same number of streams per month.

Amazon Music’s Data Analytics:

To better understand its users, Amazon Music also employs data analytics and other methods to keep tabs on things like how often a user listens to a certain artist or how often a song is added to a user’s custom playlist.

When calculating streaming royalties, this data can be utilized to see which artists and tracks are more popular than others.

It’s crucial to remember that streaming royalties may be a complicated and contentious matter, with many artists and industry insiders claiming that the existing system does not compensate creators fairly.

How Much Does Amazon Music Pay Per 1000 Streams?

On average Amazon pays artists $4.02 for 1000 streams. This is calculated based on the average payout per stream $0.00402.

How Much Does Amazon Music Pay for a Million Streams?

On average Amazon Music pays artists $4000 for a million streams. This is calculated based on the average payout per stream $0.004. But, how much you get paid can fluctuate between just a fraction below $0.001 – $0.007 per stream, depending on factors like length of the stream, country of stream & Amazon Music HD vs Amazon Music Free users.

You can also use our Amazon Music stream calculator to work how much Amazon Music (and other streaming platforms) pay for a certain number of streams.

How Many Streams Does It Take to Make $1?

With the average Amazon Music per-stream payout, it would take roughly 235 streams to make $1, which is much better than the 334 streams it takes to make a dollar on Spotify. This calculation is based on dividing $1 by the average payment amount ($0.004), and you get 235 streams.

Likewise, it takes 23,474 streams to make $100 and 234,742 streams to make $1000.

Our Findings From Stress-Testing Amazon Music Revenues

In order to delve into this deeper, we stress-tested the Amazon Music revenues by calculating the actual revenue from the streams of a specific track of ours (undisclosed). We analyzed its performance in various countries where it was streamed.

While the song is the same, the location of the listener makes quite a difference as we’ve stated about the paid subscription fees, ads, country’s artist share pool, etc. in the previous section.

So this track was being marketed through different sources and while analyzing the final revenue chart, we found that a single stream of the song made $0.00128 when it was streamed in one of the countries with the cheapest Amazon Music subscription plans.

The highest amount that this song grossed from a single stream was $0.02124, which was found in the UK, which is literally 2 cents per stream! From the recent statistics from September 2022, the UK and Ireland have the highest subscription fees of $10.96. So that doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

However, if you’re familiar with the music revenue numbers, you would instantly recognize $0.02124 as being a biggie!

1 Million streams of this track from paid subscribers from the country with the highest subscription fee of around $10/month, while ticking all the other favorable boxers would technically pay you $20,000.

However, we all know that this doesn’t really occur in the real world as it’s a hypothetical statistic. But, as an artist, taking this into consideration while marketing your releases is a game-changer.

Our Average Per Stream Value From Streams Around The World:

Now, while calculating the average value of all the streams of this track across the globe, we got a total number of 18,642 streams. As expected, some countries streamed this artist’s track way more than others. For example, the top three countries where this song was streamed the most grossed:

  • $15.0648 from 1776 streams
  • $8.5053852 from 1401 streams
  • $4.9143 from 852 streams

There were 7 countries where this song was streamed only once. Their pay per 1 stream varied from $0.0047 to 0.0158.

The total 18,642 streams of this track on Amazon Music grossed total revenue of $159.76. Now, if we were to divide this value, we get an average per-stream revenue of $0.008570327. 

As we can see from a live example that this average number is going to largely vary based on all the factors we mentioned above, like geographical locations and the price of the subscription in the country of your audience’s streaming.

While our track grossed on the higher end of what Amazon states as being the average of $0.004-$0.008, this could easily change with paid subscription drop-outs, poor performance by Amazon Music, or a change in our primary audience’s country.

Which Music Streaming Service Pays the Most Per Stream?

Napster pays artists the highest per stream, their average per-stream payout is $0.0168. Close to them in second place is Tidal, with $0.0128/stream.

Amazon also has 82.2 Million users.

Interestingly, 48.3 Million of those are from the US, which means your chances of getting paid according to their $8.99 US subscription fee are extremely high if you target the right audience for your release campaigns.

music streaming services pay out per stream comparison chart scaled
click to enlarge

Here’s a table of the average payout per stream of each streaming platform:

Streaming ServicePayout Per Stream in 2023 ($)
Napster0.01682
Tidal0.01284
Amazon Unlimited0.01175
Apple Music0.01
Deezer0.0064
Google Play0.00543
Amazon Digital Services0.00402
Spotify0.0037
Pandora 0.00133
YouTube0.00069
Others (Yandex, Peloton, iHeartRadio etc)0.012663

Note: A lot of these stats are subject to constant rate changes by various platforms. Amazon just updated their recent rates in September 2022.

Amazon’s Growth YearPercentage Growth of Users (%)No. of New Users
202220.714.1 Million
202121.612.1 Million
202046.217.7 Million

Amazon Music’s subscription base has grown nearly 114-115% over the last three years.

Some of the most fascinating stats in the recent past show the nature of the increase in Amazon subscriptions:

  • As much as 45% of all new UK subscribers to music streaming services have opted for Amazon Music.
  • Most of these were done through either Amazon Prime Video or Amazon Unlimited, as they offer lucrative deals.
  • However, at the same time, Spotify had a 21% increase in new users in the United Kingdom. So it’s quickly catching up!
  • People who use an iPhone globally, spend money on Amazon Music more than other streamers.
  • Customers who purchase an Echo smart speaker from Amazon are likely to become members of Amazon Music.
  • Growing numbers of Amazon Music subscribers are also beneficial to the company’s efforts to sell Echo gadgets.

As we can see, it’s more than just quality streaming services. The growth rates are largely controlled by factors like customer convenience and well-packaged deals.

Can Artists Earn A Living from Music Streaming Platforms Like Amazon Music?

You can earn a living from Amazon Music alone with around 1-3 Million streams a year. While it sounds like and is a huge number, a lot of commercial artists are able to do way more than that. However, building the number of streams required is difficult, and can be volatile. So, it’s recommended to be visible on multiple platforms.

Live shows, multi-platform streaming, merch, YouTube, courses etc. can produce more consistent monthly incomes, while your streaming revenues go through their periodic fluctuations.

However, most musicians cannot make it as full-time artists just through streaming. To give just one example, if a musician or band gets 100,000 streams, that’s a significant achievement. Yet, this is only around $300-$400, which would probably be spent on instrument maintenance, plugins, yearly software subscriptions, and whatnot.

Since more and more musicians are jumping into Amazon, Apple, and Spotify, it’s getting harder to carve a niche out for yourself.

How Many Streams Does it Take To Earn Minimum Wage?

Here’s a table of the number of streams you need on each platform to earn minimum wage ($15,080/Year) in the US:

Streaming ServiceAmount of Streams Per Year
Napster896.6K
Tidal1.2M
Amazon Music Unlimited1.3M
Apple Music1.5M
Deezer2.4M
Spotify4.1M
Pandora11.6M
YouTube21.9M

Where you decide to upload your music makes all the difference. Amazon fares much better if your music is streamed in countries that charge more than $8.9 per month. Napster’s higher per-stream compensation means that fewer streams are required to make a profit. You’ll need a lot more as the compensation per stream is low on YouTube and others.

These calculations have been worked out using the $0.003 average payout per stream value and the US minimum wage, which is $15,080/year. Since these are before September 2022, Amazon’s increased rates aren’t reflected.

number of streams minimum wage

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