Which Streaming Service Pays Musicians The Least

The one that is most popular, of course.

YouTube.

They pay $0.00069 per view.  It takes over 1449 views for a musician or band to make a dollar on YouTube.  And that usually needs to be shared with the label and agent and so on.

The best is Napster, at $0.019 per stream.  At that rate, a song takes 52.6 plays for the musician or band to make a dollar.

Apple and Amazon are in between these two companies.

A chart can be found on DittoMusic.

To make $1,000 off of YouTube, a solo musician, who has no representation nor label, would need her song to be viewed almost 1.5 million times.  To earn $1,000 on Napster, it would take 52,632 streams.

Or you think about it in terms of what it takes to make a living.  Digital Music News looked at the streaming services in 2019 and determined that it takes 2.13 million YouTube plays in a month to earn the United States Monthly Minimum Wage of $1,472.  On Napster, the number is only 77,474 streams.

Scratch a little deeper and it turns out that only 56% of music revenue ends up on the hands of labels and artists, so artists are getting even less.  Kind of amazing when there is so little physical product to pay for, and so much production labor has disappeared–no albums, no shipping, no stocking, etc.

Hard way to make a living.