Miller’s goal is to one day make music a full-time job. But her low artist fees on Spotify mean she has to share her own music elsewhere to make money.
“A lot of people came up to me after I played[the live show]and asked if they could listen to my songs on Spotify,” Miller says. They give me streams, but not enough streams to actually quit my day job.”
In August 2022, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced a new resolution calling for a new streaming payment system that fairly and directly compensates artists whenever their music is streamed. Tlab’s release contained an astonishing calculation. To equate to $15 an hour, he would need over 800,000 streams a month.
Instead of paying artists directly, Spotify pays rights holders who pay artists. According to Spotify, about two-thirds of the revenue from music goes to rights holders. Rightsholders are the licensors that artists pay to upload music to Spotify on their behalf. Often record labels and distributors. This money is split between recording royalties (paid to the artist through the licensor) and publishing royalties paid to the songwriter or song owner. Artists are paid different amounts depending on their contract with the rights holder.
Ava Mastroianni, a 19-year-old singer who makes music under the name Ava Dallas, uses DistroKid to publish her music to streaming services. DistroKid makes about $20 a year and gives all of the revenue from the stream back to the artists. Artists are responsible for producing and promoting music.
“If you’re not on a label, you have a lot more to do and pay for,” says Mastroianni. “I pay DistroKid $20 a year to distribute my music, so basically I’m paying to release music.”
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How much does Apple Music pay per stream?
Apple Music doesn’t pay per stream either.
Apple Music charges about $0.01 per play, the company reports. However, this does not necessarily mean that the artist earns $0.01 per stream. Like Spotify, Apple Music calculates royalties on a stream share basis. This is the percentage of an individual song’s total Apple Music streams.
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Mastroianni, a music industry student at Northeastern University, said he’s learned that commodities and social media are two of the industry’s most powerful moneymakers.
“I make a lot of money from the TikTok Creator Fund, and social media in general (including advertising), but merch is definitely one of my biggest sellers,” she says.
Creators with 100,000 or more views in the last 30 days are eligible to earn money from TikTok. TikTok will fund her TikTok that generates high views, engagement and content. TikTok entered the streaming world in March 2022 with its distribution platform SoundOn.
Outside of live gigs, Miller has a successful songwriting career, and “most of the money goes to music,” she says.
She earns $100 to write songs for Songfinch customers, a platform where artists produce original songs based on their wishes.
Miller said he believes Spotify’s paid fees often discourage artists from making more music. She feeds her passion for art in ways other than uploading to her Spotify. Because when it comes to writing her own songs, it’s expensive for her to hire a producer.
“Possibly spending up to $1,000 to finish and put a song out there, and getting $5 for it, really doesn’t make me want to keep doing it,” says Miller. “All the money you plan to spend creating it and making it high quality, I want it to represent me on Spotify. I’m not going to take it back.”
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