How Much Does Apple Music Pay Per Stream? We Thoroughly Researched It

Pay per stream of all streaming services:

• Spotify Pay Per Stream
• Napster Pay Per Stream
• Apple Music Pay Per Stream
• Tidal Pay Per Stream
• Deezer Pay Per Stream
• YouTube Pay Per Stream
• Pandora Pay Per Stream
• Amazon Pay Per Stream

Useful articles + tools for royalties:

• Every Average Streaming Royalty Payout
• Music Royalty Calculator

If you want to make a success of yourself in the music industry and to make enough money to live from it, it’s important to understand streaming royalties and how much money you’re making on streaming platforms like Apple Music. In this article, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about how much music Apple Music pays per stream, how they pay you, and what you can do to get the most out of your music.

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

Here’s how much Apple Music pays per stream:

This high payout per stream rate makes Apple Music the 4th most paid platform out of all the streaming services. This is great news for artists, because Apple Music owns 24.7% of the streaming market share, and has over 88 million paid subscribers – a number that is growing rapidly and consistently.

Didn’t Get $0.01 Per Stream? Here’s Why

In reality, Apple Music does not pay a straight $0.01 per stream, but rather a percentage of what it earns in monthly revenue to rightsholders.

Average payouts per stream are difficult to calculate accurately. This is because of the way streaming revenue is paid out.

Streaming Services pay artists using this process:

• Calculates the money it earns through subscriptions of advertising revenue.
• Takes its cut from this value (for Spotfy & Apple Music this is a 52% headline rate)
• Then pays the rightsholders (label, distributor etc.) the percentage share of the streams they have gathered

This makes it impossible to truly calculate that each payout per stream is worth $0.01. The average might be $0.01 overall, but that doesn’t account for everyone and the different deals they have agreed with the streaming service.

Additionally, with a lower subscriber count, the likelihood is that there are less users streaming tracks, meaning the average is clearly going to be higher on Apple Music, considering it has half of the user base that Spotify does.

This means that on Apple Music, you won’t earn more for your music streams than you will on Spotify because of the sheer volume of plays and users that Spotify can get for you.

How Does A Mere Deal Change The Payout Per Stream I Get?

So we know that Apple Music pays the same 52% headline rate to all labels and distributors. But here’s where it gets tricky – that 52% is the final pool of the revenue after Apple Music takes its cut. This 52% is then distributed among rightsholders based on the percent of the total streams they have achieved for the month.

Why does this change the payout per stream you’re getting?

Because, for example, if Sony Music is taking 60% of the total streams, there is a lower percentage to be taken by the rest of the labels and distributors, making your earnings fluctuate more.

However, Apple Music claims that they pay the same rate, and don’t offer deals to different labels and rightsholders based on the number of streams they bring in for the service.

This theoretically means you can sign with any label or distributor and get the same rate per stream as someone else who is signed with a different label – something Spotify and other services are guilty of doing – they work out different deals for different labels and distributors.

Why Average Payouts Per Stream are Misleading

Because there is a smaller pool of people streaming, this means the pay-per-stream rate can look higher, because fewer people are streaming as many times, lowering the average.

This realistically means that Spotify pays more than Apple Music pays artists. And, even though Napster or Tidal look like they pay more per stream – it’s false.

The higher the revenue and user base, the more you’ll likely earn as an artist on that platform.

Want To Make The Most Out of Your Streaming Revenue? – Which Streaming Service Pays The Most Per Stream?

This means you’ll earn less from Napster because you’ll never accumulate the streams necessary to earn much.

You will most likely earn the largest chunk of your streaming revenue from the platform you get the most streams on. For most people, this will be Spotify due to the sheer number of people and the opportunities for playlisting.

The streaming service that will earn you the 2nd biggest chunk is likely to be Apple Music as it has the 2nd most active users.

Here is a quick list of the rates streaming platforms pay artists:

Streaming Service	Payout Per Stream ($)
Napster	0.01682
Tidal	0.01284
Amazon Unlimited	0.01175
Apple Music	0.01
Deezer	0.0064
Google Play	0.00543
Amazon Digital Services	0.00402
Spotify	0.0037
Pandora	0.00133
YouTube	0.00069
Others (Yandex, Peloton, iHeartRadio etc)	0.012663

Which Service Has The Most Paid Subscribers, Revenue & Market Share Then?

Even though Apple Music has a lower amount of paying subscribers, they have managed to capture the US market share, exceeding Spotify’s paid subscription number in the states.

The lowest subscriber streaming service is Tidal, with 0.98% of the market share and a low count of 5 million paying subscribers. The small amount of subscribers helps to push the average payout per stream higher.

If you notice, the highest paying streaming platforms, have the smallest subscriber base.

Here’s a list of each music streaming platform, covering the subscribers and market share:

Streaming Service	Total Paid Subscriptions	Market Share (%)
Spotify	180 million	48.3
Apple Music	98 million	24.97
Amazon Unlimited Music	55 million	4.04
YouTube Music	50 million	6.99
Deezer	16 million	2.6
Pandora	6.5 million	3.03
Napster	5 million	0.8
Tidal	3 million	0.98

Can Artists Earn A Living From Apple Music?

However, these streaming royalties may vary from artist to artist, and will vary on different music streaming services.

Most artists will earn the majority of their money through live shows, merch, and other products in the music business, such as sample packs.

For example, only 2% of Spotify artists earned over $1000 in 2020, with 0.2% of those artists earning over $50k from their streaming royalties.

Apple Music, unfortunately, doesn’t have any data to show how many artists are earning a living from the streaming platform, but based on the numbers from Spotify, you can expect the number of artists to be much lower, considering the lower subscriber count.

It’s reported that, for smaller artists, the average payout for a single live gig is 3x more than what they will earn from a year on Spotify, Apple Music or any other music streaming platform.

How Many Streams Does It Take To Earn Minimum Wage On Each Platform?

29.3% of the platform would have to stream your song at least once to earn minimum wage on Napster. For a single artist to get 29.3%, you would have to be near world-famous.

It’s much more likely for you to earn a minimum wage on Apple Music or Spotify due to the higher rate of paying subscribers and user base.

Here is a quick list of the number of streams you need to get for US minimum wage:

Streaming Service	Amount of Streams Per Year
Napster	896.6K
Tidal	1.2M
Amazon Music Unlimited	1.3M
Apple Music	1.5M
Deezer	2.4M
Spotify	4.1M
Pandora	11.6M
YouTube	21.9M

Who Are The Highest Earning Artists on Apple Music?

As you can see, compared to the highest-paid artists on Spotify, these values are much smaller.

Apple Music Streaming Royalty Calculator

To check how much you could earn on Apple Music, we’ve created a streaming royalty calculator for all music streaming platforms. Select Apple Music from the royalty calculator below and enter your streams.

Please take note that this is based on Apple Music’s average payout per stream. It will give you a rough idea of what you could earn from those streams. It does not take into account different label deals, different rightsholder deals etc.

FAQ