Independent Music Label Reveals What Streaming Services Pay Best: YouTube Looks Nice While Spotify Lags (Last Place Might Surprise)

If you're engaged with the debate over how much streaming services such as Spotify are paying performers for their wares and want to take your business to those who reward performers most, this chart from Digital Music News might help you in your quest. The site got data from an American independent label (unnamed to protect the imprint's business interests) with a global distribution deal with a "major" digital distributor.

The chart, taken from an Excel sheet, displays the streaming provider and how much it paid, from highest to lowest. The data comes from the fourth quarter of 2014 and represents the average payout per stream from each. Here's what we're looking at:

YouTube: .04630

Microsoft Zune Music: .03668

Omnifone: .01698

Beats: .01404

Cricket: .01059

Google Music: .01052

Deezer: .00983

Spotify: .00728

Rdio: .00506

KKBOX: .00271

Nokia: .00185

MySpace: .00089

YouTube seems to be the obvious go-to but a few specifications make it able to pay out nearly a nickel a play: These numbers come from YouTube Music Key, a service that requires a subscription, and generally features just music and lyric videos. You won't find Drake's entire new mixtape/album on there. Microsoft Zune is an entry that confused us just as much as it did Digital Music News. Apparently the service is still available on Xbox and other Windows hardware, and paying nicely to musicians as well (an entrepreneurial type might joke this is why the Zune mp3 hardware went on out production).

Spotify, of course, is on the lower half of the list, paying rough seven-tenths of a cent per stream. Meaning, if you played Drake's aforementioned album all the way through, he'd get just more than 12 cents for it (of course his label may have a better deal with the streaming service). That may see absurdly low but MySpace shows how low it can go: Drake's full album would get him just 1.5 cents on that platform. MySpace is intended as a showcase however, and most performers never intend to profit from it, but rather to gather attention so listeners pursue their goods in other markets.

Tags

Spotify, YouTube, Deezer