Streams to money calculator: what every platform pays per stream

What every platform pays per stream in 2026

All figures are averages paid to the rights holder (the account that owns the recording), before your distributor's cut, checked 15 October 2026. Each platform's page explains its own range and quotes every source word for word. By the middle of the range, Deezer and Tidal pay the most per stream and YouTube Content ID the least, but per-stream rates say little about totals: a platform with more of your listeners pays you more in the end, whatever its rate.

TikTok is not in the table because it does not pay per play. It pays labels and distributors from a licensing pool based on how often a sound is used; the best public figure is about $0.50 per 1,000 videos made with your sound, after the distributor (Duetti).

What you keep after your distributor

The distributor is the first cut. Most subscription distributors keep nothing from streaming and charge a yearly fee instead; free or pay-per-release ones keep a percentage. Here is what 1 million Spotify streams leave you with each one, before any label share or splits.

Why there is no fixed rate per stream

Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and the others pay from a monthly pool: subscription and ad money in each market, minus the platform's share, divided by every stream in that market. Spotify says it directly: "Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate" (Spotify for Artists). The per-stream figures people quote are averages worked out afterwards from royalty statements, which is why they move every month and differ between sources.

Three things decide where you land inside a range: where your listeners are (a stream from a country with a big royalty pool is worth more), whether they pay for the service, and how much everyone else streamed that month. You cannot control the last one, which is why the calculator always shows a range and never a single promise.

Free and paid listeners

Services with a free tier (Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon, Deezer, SoundCloud, Pandora, Audiomack) pay much less for an ad-supported play than for a subscriber's play. Apple Music and Tidal have no free tier, which is the main reason their per-stream averages are higher. Listener country matters too: on Spotify, Ditto Music gives $3.90 per 1,000 for listeners in the United States against $1.80 for Portugal (Ditto Music blog).

The Spotify 1,000-stream rule

Since 1 April 2024 a track has to reach 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months before Spotify pays any recorded royalties on it. Spotify's own words: "tracks must have reached a threshold of at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months" (Spotify for Artists). There is also a minimum number of unique listeners, and Spotify does not publish it (source).

The money those small tracks would have earned is not lost: it goes back into the pool for eligible tracks. Spotify says tracks with 1 to 1,000 yearly streams earned about $0.03 a month on average before the rule (source). The calculator above warns you when a track is under the line: type its streams for the last 12 months into the optional field.

Spotify pay per stream by country

Where a named, dated source gives a figure for listeners in a country, it has its own page: United States ($3.90), Portugal ($1.80), all per 1,000 streams.

Worked examples

• 1 million Spotify streams pay about $3,000 to $5,000. The same streams on Apple Music would pay about $6,200 to $10,000.
• How many streams to make $1,000: about 200,000 to 333,000 on Spotify, about 100,000 to 161,000 on Apple Music, about 182,000 to 223,000 on YouTube Music.
• Rent of $1,500 a month from Spotify alone takes about 300,000 to 500,000 streams every month with a 0% distributor cut.
• A three-way split (you 50%, producer 30%, featured artist 20%) of 1 million Spotify streams: you get about $1,500 to $2,500, the producer $900 to $1,500 and the feature $600 to $1,000.

What these figures leave out

Every number here is the recording (master) side: what the platform pays the account that owns the recording, usually your distributor account. Songwriting money is separate. Mechanical and performance royalties for the composition go to the publisher, collection society or PRO, and US radio-style plays also earn SoundExchange money. None of that is in these figures, so a songwriter who owns their masters earns more than the table shows.