How Many Plays It Takes For An Artist To Earn A Dollar On Each Music Streaming Platform, Visualized

Ever since Napster rocked the music industry 20 years ago, recording artists have been struggling to find a way to make money on the internet. Peer-to-peer file sharing slashed the profitability of the recording industry and it took years for them to recover. Finally, on the strength of paid streaming services like Spotify, revenue from music has begun to grow again.

But how much do artists actually get paid per song stream? The data visualization gurus at Visual Capitalist took a look at the numbers — which they garnered from crunching stats from a revenue dataset they "received from from an indie label with a ~150 album catalogue generating over 115 million streams" — and created a fascinating infographic showing how many streams it takes an artist to make one dollar. View the full chart here.

Ironically, Napster gives the most money per stream of all the major streaming services, paying out about $0.02 per stream. Spotify, the biggest streaming service, gives about $0.00437 per stream, while YouTube has the lowest payout per stream with $0.00069 (not nice).

At the end of the day, unless you're doing Gangnam Style-esque numbers on these platforms, you're probably not going to be making much money by streaming your songs. Conversely, outside of the streaming world, Bandcamp has the best reputation for paying artists for music downloads.

[Via Visual Capitalist]