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Music Streaming (Spotify) Help Center
You pay a monthly fee and it feels effortless — nobody tells you how much of that reaches the artist
5 questions answered
- When I play a song once, how much actually reaches the artist?As of 2026, Spotify pays roughly $0.003-$0.005 per stream — free/ad-supported plays pay even less.
- How does this compare to YouTube's 45% revenue share or app store 30% fees?It's not really comparable — YouTube/app stores take a percentage of realized revenue, while streaming calculates a per-stream payout from a shared pool. See /platform-fee for a full platform-fee comparison.
- Why do new/independent artists sometimes get $0 despite having plays?Since 2023, Spotify only pays royalties on tracks that hit at least 1,000 streams in a year — below that threshold, plays generate no payout at all.
- So is Spotify not making money, that it needs a structure like this?No — streaming generated roughly 70% of the global music industry's $31.7 billion in 2025 revenue (per IFPI). The platform and major labels draw steadily from that pool; the payout-gap risk falls mainly on individual creators.
- Why did Melon get rid of its real-time chart?After repeated 2018–2019 chart-manipulation scandals ("sajaegi"), Korea's top music platform scrapped its real-time chart entirely in 2020 — and to date, nobody has ever been criminally punished for it.