Which streaming service pays artists the most?

And by artists, I mean ‘rights holders’. Many musicians only get their cut once the rights holder (usually a record label) has taken its cut.

According to musician and YouTuber Benn Jordan, Qobuz comes out on top with US$0.0136 per stream. Amazon isn’t too far behind with US$0.0096 per stream. The screenshot above is from Jordan’s latest video which is predominantly about AI’s incursion into music streaming:

Per Jordan, Peloton (the exercise bike company) pays more per stream than Qobuz but for our purposes, it’s Qobuz that takes the crown. The French company pays out three times more money per stream than Spotify.

Before you bust out the bunting for Qobuz and/or pat yourself on the back for being a Qobuz subscriber, consider how 1000 streams of a song on Qobuz would send the rights holder a cheque for US$13.60 (instead of Spotify’s US$3). Theoretically. The reality of the pro-rata payout model used by most streaming services will see them earn less. Only an artist-centric model would guarantee the artist that same US$13.60.

In other words, three times a pittance is better…but it’s still a pittance. And I think I read somewhere recently that 80% of all songs on Spotify (ergo: all streaming services) are streamed less than 1000 times.

Also, as Jordan points out in his video, when Spotify launched in the USA in 2011, it paid out over twice as much per stream as it does today. This has me ask, is a streaming service’s subscriber base size inversely correlated with its per-stream royalty fee? I suspect even Qobuz would admit that it has the smallest number of subscribers of all the services shown in Jordan’s list.

None of this excuses us from supporting our favourite musicians by attending their shows and buying their merch, CDs, cassettes and vinyl.