Photo Credit: Brett Jordan
Amazon Music and Apple Music are crushing Spotify in the per-stream royalty department for indie artists – at least according to a new report exploring on-demand platforms’ compensation specifics.
Duetti disclosed this and other noteworthy findings in its second-annual Music Economics Report today. As laid out in the resource, across-the-board recording royalties (covering the aforementioned services as well as YouTube, Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, SoundCloud, and Pandora) “are finally stabilizing” for indie acts.
Against the backdrop of price bumps – and an inherent streaming-volume increase – that refers to a global average of $3.41 per 1,000 streams in 2024, down just slightly from 2023’s $3.46 and more than that from 2022’s $3.69.
But behind the average, Amazon Music led the pack in royalties paid out per 1,000 streams ($8.80), followed by Apple Music ($6.20), YouTube ($4.80), and then Spotify ($3.00), the report shows.
That data is interesting on multiple levels – especially since Spotify early last year went ahead and stopped paying recording royalties on the vast majority of uploads.
As things stand, tracks need to rack up 1,000 annual streams on Spotify before they can even begin receiving recording royalty payments. Also pertinent here are Spotify’s stateside prices (which are more expensive than those of Apple Music and Amazon Music) and the fact that Apple Music, as first reported by Digital Music News, pays out royalties at a higher rate for works made available in spatial audio.
Regarding other important takeaways, Duetti indicated that indie professionals utilizing Spotify’s Discovery Mode – which promotes tracks in exchange for a reduced royalty rate on the resulting plays – generated 26% of their on-platform streams from the feature in 2024.
That’s double 2023’s 13% and, for obvious reasons, contributed significantly to the “lowering overall per stream payout rates” for indie talent, per the study.
Digital Music News reached out to Spotify about Duetti’s findings – chief among them that Spotify’s per-stream royalty rate is less than half Apple Music’s and close to one-third of Amazon Music’s.
“These claims are ridiculous and unfounded,” a Spotify spokesperson responded. “No streaming service pays per stream because that approach would incentivize streaming services to minimize streams. It would mean low engagement, fewer artist connections, and lower overall payouts. Instead, we take the opposite approach. We want users to engage more so that they pay more – both by sticking around and choosing premium. We are proud to be the leader in total payouts, but that doesn’t happen by accident; it’s by design.
“Further, not only do we dispute the numbers and unattributed ‘guesses’ across the board, but we reject the premise of the report because it is out of step with the reality of how the industry works,” the rep concluded.
To state the obvious, artists do, in fact, receive per-stream royalty payments from Spotify and competing platforms. While the payout process isn’t as simple as attaching a set sum to each play – among different things, eligible streams are actually pooled and then compensated by market based on their share of the relevant revenue – it ultimately boils down to pay per stream.
And it’ll certainly be worth keeping the above information in mind during the remainder of 2025 and beyond. For better or worse (with an emphasis on the latter), the audio-upload deluge, increasingly fueled by AI, appears unlikely to abate on streaming services.
Meanwhile, on-demand play volume, including in regions where monetization is a challenge, is still on the rise, separate reports have spelled out.