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

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’re a musician who wants to make the most of your income and establish reasonable long-term goals, you need to familiarise yourself with streaming royalties and how they are paid. In the writing of this article, we spent hours researching the numbers behind Pandora and how much they pay per stream. Do you want to know how much Pandora will pay for each stream in 2023? You’ve come to the correct place.

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

As you’ll see in this article, streaming royalties are far more intricate monsters, and determining an accurate payout per stream rate is tough. The price that music streaming services pay per stream is based on market conditions and licensing agreements.

It’s important to remember that the money streaming services pay to musicians and rights holders are typically split among numerous parties, including:

• The record label
• The distributor
• The publisher
• And the artist(s) themselves.

As a result, the specific amount an artist or songwriter earns each stream might vary substantially based on the specifics of their agreement.

Pandora currently has 6.3 million paid subscribers currently and online radio service Pandora has 50.5 million monthly regular listeners, according to Q2 2022. Pandora’s popularity has been declining over the past four years, but the service still has enough subscribers to rank as the sixth-largest music streaming platform in the world.

But with only 1% of the streaming service market share, it’s miles behind the likes of Amazon, with 13.3% in third place, not to mention Apple and Spotify with far greater dominance of the streaming pie.

Why does this matter?

The percentage market share is how much revenue Pandora accounts for in the market of all companies’ streaming revenue. Since they account for 1%, this means their revenue is significantly lower than other competitors, affecting the subscriber rate.

This, in turn, means that there is less money to share around and even fewer users to even get you the number of streams you’d need to earn a full-time living from streaming alone.

This brings us onto…

How Much Does Pandora Pay Per 1000 Streams?

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

But, although Pandora pays $1.33 on paper, this really isn’t the case for all artists. Due to the lower base of paying subscribers, there is less data to even out the average pay per stream, making it an inaccurate measurement.

This is because not all streams are created equally.

For instance, free users may earn you less if they stream your music because money is made through how they interact with adverts. Different advertisers have different deals. Additionally, different countries will pay out different rates due to the varying economic conditions of the inhabitants.

Furthermore, streaming royalties aren’t paid out on a per-stream basis – rather – artists are paid a share of the percentage of the total revenue created that month.

So if Ed Sheeran got 20% of the total streams this month, he will make 20% of the revenue.

This is an extremely basic example, but you get the picture. In a real example, more factors like Pandora’s cut, advertisers cut, distributors’ and labels’ cuts come into it and Ed Sheeran actually gets a lot less than 20%

How Much Does Pandora Pay for a Million Streams?

However unappealing this may seem, there is money to be made on Pandora as we’ll discover further in this article. Especially if you’re an independent artist or band, don’t yet remove Pandora from your list of places to stream on, as there is more to it than what meets the eye.

How Many Streams Does It Take to Make $1?

Likewise, it takes 75,200 streams to make $100 and 752,000 streams to make $1000.

How Can You Calculate Your Pandora Streaming Royalties?

Understanding and capitalizing on the different service models can make a huge difference.

Pandora’s Interactive Vs Non-Interactive Streaming:

In its early days, Pandora was mostly recognized for its non-interactive streaming, or “internet radio.” While listeners can personalize their stations to their tastes, they are limited in their ability to play certain songs. A listener can sit back and relax with non-interactive streaming.

The term “interactive streaming,” which is sometimes known as “on-demand streaming,” describes a service that allows listeners to select their own media for playback. It works in a manner analogous to that of Apple Music or Spotify.

The debut of Pandora Premium, however, shows that Pandora is expanding into the realm of interactive streaming. Even more so, the non-interactive radio service’s ad-free version, Pandora Plus, has added an interactive streaming feature, the ability to repeat songs.

Subscribers to Pandora Plus can listen to their music without interruption from ads, at $54.89 yearly, or $4.99 each month. Pandora Premium subscribers pay either $9.99 per month or $109.89 per year.

Premium users get access to higher-quality audio and longer timeouts than Plus users, and they can construct fully personalized playlists that they can listen to offline for as long as their mobile device will allow. This is where the money is mainly made on Pandora.

Eventually, as we see, the method listeners use to access music on Pandora will determine the royalty rate paid to artists.

How Do You Earn From Pandora’s Interactive Royalty Rates?

However, we can’t stress enough cutting a direct license deal with Pandora, without which the ‘on-demand’ and interactive listening isn’t available and all royalties have to go through SoundExchange.

Through the Interactive route, you also make money via:

1. A fee charged for a sound recording license
   • The sound recording fee charged for obtaining a license is commonly regarded as the normal amount received by the owner of the sound recording for their streaming. Pandora will pay your distributor for this.
   • If you use the services of a distributor, the payments will appear in your earnings along with the details of each song or song within an album.
2. Mechanical remuneration
   • A mechanical royalty is paid to your publisher whenever your track is mechanically or digitally reproduced in the form of vinyl, CD, or stream. Mechanical royalties are, however, hard for an artist to claim and collect on their own without the help of a publishing administrator.
   • This is especially true if the physical copies of your music are distributed globally. Collecting worldwide publication royalties, including mechanical royalties from interactive streams come under this category.

How Do You Earn From Pandora’s Non-Interactive Royalty Rates?

An online, non-interactive service provider like Pandora pays Non-Interactive Royalty fees for the use of a specific recorded version of a song. These payments are basically digital royalties. They are not exactly publication royalties because they pertain to the recording rather than the music itself.

The recipients of digital royalties are different from those of publishing royalties, which are songwriters and publishers.

Unlike other streaming platforms like Amazon, which are fairly straightforward, you need to be quite aware of where your money is going within Pandora’s structure.

The more roles you occupy as a producer, performer, primary artist, label, and distributor, the more the chances of you getting paid most of the money that goes through Pandora’s system.

While the royalty collection procedure we’re about to explain might seem too strenuous, it’s mainly designed to make sure independent artists wearing different hats can have more control over their music as well as their money.

Where & How Do You Collect Your Pandora Royalties?

Pandora gives its artists their cut by remitting funds to SoundExchange, a non-profit that collects and pays digital performance royalties to performers and rights holders. Signing up to SoundExchange gets you access to your digital performance royalties.

Pandora pays the rights holder’s chunk of the money to the distributor of the sound recording. Your distributor will subsequently pay those royalties to the recording’s owner.

Earlier, you could claim both your artist and label shares from Pandora through SoundExchange. Nowadays, Pandora sends the copyright owner’s portion of digital performance royalties straight to the artist’s distributor for any directly licensed music on their service. The same is not included in their payments to SoundExchange.

As you can see, having a good Distributor channel is very important if you’re planning to stream via Pandora.

What’s The Most Optimised Way Of Making Money On Pandora?

The songwriter and publisher are owed a performance royalty for the broadcast of their music, just as they are for radio plays in olden times. If you compose original music, Pandora owes you performance royalties.

Similarly to conventional radio, performance royalties are divided as follows:

• 50% to the composer/band
• 50% to the publisher or publishers
  
  If you are the publisher of your own music, you can collect both the writer and publisher shares if you have not given away your publishing rights.

In order to collect performance royalties, you must join a performing rights organization such as SESAC, ASCAP, or BMI. You can then use a distribution service to get on streaming services, earn streaming royalties and mechanical royalties, along with the publishing royalties on ASCAP, BMI, PRS and others.

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. As we can see from the stats chart below, Pandora is way below the bottom.

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

Streaming Service	Payout Per Stream in 2023 ($)
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

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

Can I Earn A Living From My Music & Music Streaming Alone?

If you propagate your releases across multiple platforms and maximise your potential revenues, it is entirely possible to earn enough to make a living doing music.

Getting knowledgeable about money in music and registering with a performance rights organization (PRO) like PRS to your earnings is another way to increase your earnings.

This is especially true if your song is being played on the radio. If you want to maximize your monthly earnings from royalties from radio airplay, signing up for a PRO service is an absolute must.

To top it all off, you may offer sample packs, preset packs, merchandise, etc. from the music you make. For example, your DAW project files have all the makings of a dedicated style-specific sample pack, with a preset list, loops library, and maybe tutorial videos done on the process of production, which could be sold as a course if you’re good at teaching.

While this example is quite producer-specific, you could use similar same ideas if you’re an instrumentalist or a singer for that matter.

As we’re on this topic, don’t forget to check out our definitive guide to generating success as a DIY artist to start growing your fanbase more rapidly (it’s free)!

Wrapping Up

Quickly circling back on the numbers, how much does Pandora actually pay per stream?

However, as you would have read above, not all streams are created equally. Depending on whether you get interactive or non-interactive streams, determines the payout you recieve. Additionally, it is hard to calculate an average payout per stream on Pandora, because there simply aren’t enough users or data to make the data accurate.

On top of all that, there’s also a smaller pool of users on Pandora, meaning that, in order to achieve the streams to earn a full-time living, you’d have to get a large percentage of the total streams on the platform, and with fewer users, you’ll likely get fewer streams.

Pandora pays out royalties based on the amount it earns that month, and the percentage of the total streams you go for the platform (after it takes its cut). This means that average payouts are usually a bad measurement to use because they can fluctuate massively.

Different countries will earn different rates, different subscriber statuses will earn different amounts, and whether that person clicks or interacts with ads or not.

Despite the amount that goes into working out streaming royalties and payouts, average streaming rates can still be useful to work out rough estimates and set goals for your music career.