How Much Streaming Platforms Pay Per Stream in 2026
Compare per-stream rates across Spotify, Apple, Tidal, YouTube, Amazon, and more, and what affects your payout.
How Much Streaming Platforms Pay Per Stream in 2026
How Much Streaming Platforms Pay Per Stream in 2026
Compare per-stream rates across Spotify, Apple, Tidal, YouTube, Amazon, and more, and what affects your payout.
Streaming platforms pay somewhere between $0.001 and $0.019 per stream. The rate depends on the platform, where your listeners live, and whether they pay for a subscription. And if you write your own songs, the payment from your distributor is only part of what your streams earn.
Below, we'll break down what every major platform pays in 2026, why the same song earns different amounts on different services, and how to make sure you're collecting all of your royalties.
Streaming services don't pay a fixed amount for each play, since listeners aren't charged per song. Most platforms also don't share official per-stream rates. The numbers you see online, including most listed here, are estimates calculated from what artists were actually paid per stream, as published by distributors like TuneCore and Ditto Music. If a platform like Apple Music or Qobuz has confirmed its rate, we've pointed that out.
Your actual payout will land above or below these averages depending on the platform, where your listeners live, and whether they pay for a subscription.
Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. That works out to around 230 streams for every dollar.
The rate is low for a few reasons:
If most of your streams come from US or UK subscribers, you'll earn above the average rate. If your listeners are mostly on the free tier or in cheaper markets, you'll earn below it.
The money is still enormous at scale. Spotify paid rights holders over $11 billion in 2025, more than any platform ever has in a year. However, keep in mind that since 2024, a track needs 1,000 streams in a 12-month window to earn anything.
Apple Music pays roughly $0.007 to $0.01 per stream, about double Spotify's rate. Apple itself has said the average is one cent per stream.
The rate is higher because nobody listens to Apple Music for free. There's no ad-supported tier, so every stream comes from a paying subscriber, and there's nothing dragging the average down.
Apple also pays up to 10 percent more for tracks available in Spatial Audio. The higher rate applies as long as an Atmos version of the track exists, even if nobody plays it.
Tidal pays roughly $0.013 to $0.015 per stream based on industry estimates. There's no free tier, so every stream comes from a paying subscriber.
The catch is Tidal only has a few million subscribers, while Spotify has 290 million. Your streams will earn a better rate, but there won't be many of them unless your fans happen to use Tidal. The rate rewards a following you already have, and it won't build one for you.
YouTube Music pays an estimated $0.001 to $0.002 per stream, the lowest of the big platforms. Same problem as Spotify but worse, since YouTube runs on ads and ad streams pay a fraction of premium ones.
Unlike other platforms, YouTube pays you in three different ways:
Content ID is where money goes unclaimed. It only works if your distributor registered your catalog with it, and unregistered music earns nothing no matter how many videos use it.
Amazon Music pays about $0.004 per stream (based on industry estimates), about the same as Spotify. The catch is that Amazon has three tiers, and they pay very differently.
A stream from a full Unlimited subscriber can pay $0.007 or more, while a stream from someone listening through Prime or on the free tier can pay under $0.001.
Deezer pays an estimated $0.005 to $0.007 per premium stream. And in late 2023, it changed its payout rules in favor of working musicians:
So far, Deezer is the only major platform that weights streams this way.
Qobuz pays roughly $0.015 to $0.019 per stream, based on its own audited figure of $0.01873 per stream from its 2024 fiscal year.
This number includes publishing royalties, and the recording royalty alone works out to about $0.015, which still beats every other service. You'll see higher numbers floating around online, but this is the only per-stream rate validated by an independent audit.
The rate is high for the same reasons as Tidal, taken further. Qobuz has no free tier, its hi-res plans cost more, and it makes about five times more revenue per user than the market average.
However, Qobuz is a small platform for hi-fi listeners, so the rate applies to streams most artists won't get many of unless their fans are audiophiles.
Streaming platforms don't pay a set rate per stream. Instead, they pay artists out of a shared pool of money, a system called the pro-rata model. Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music all use it.
All the subscription fees and ad dollars from a country go into one pool. The platform keeps roughly a third for itself, and the remaining two-thirds are divided across rights holders based on their share of total streams. If your songs got 1 percent of all streams on the platform, you get 1 percent of the pool.
This means someone can pay $11.99 a month and only stream your music, but most of their fee still goes to the platform's biggest artists. The pool splits by total streams, and the biggest artists have the most streams.
SoundCloud and Deezer handle this process differently. SoundCloud divides each listener's fee between the artists a listener actually played, and Deezer gives extra weight to working artists and songs people manually search for. On both platforms, small artists with loyal fans earn more than they would under the pro-rata model.
Around 40% of Spotify users pay for Premium, and those subscribers bring in close to 90% of the revenue. The other 60% listen free, and the ads they hear generate the rest.
This is why the same song earns more from a subscriber than from a free listener. The royalty pool is built from revenue, and nearly 90% of it comes from subscriptions. A free stream pays less because there's less money behind it, usually about a third of what a premium stream pays.
It's also why the platforms have such different per-stream rates. They all pay out roughly two-thirds of their revenue, so a service full of subscribers, like Apple Music, ends up with a higher rate than one with mostly free listeners, like Spotify or YouTube.
And the numbers keep going up. In the US alone, streaming brought in $9.5 billion in 2025, 82% of a record $11.5 billion market. Goldman Sachs expects global recorded music revenue to nearly double by 2035, and since royalty pools come from that revenue, the money paying your streams grows with it.
No two artists earn the same rate, even on the same platform. Your rate depends on a few things:
Also, the rates everyone quotes only cover the recording royalty. If you wrote the song, each stream owes you a mechanical royalty and a performance royalty on top of that. The MLC collects the mechanical and your PRO collects the performance royalty, so make sure you're registered with both, because the money won't find you otherwise.
Your distributor only collects one of your royalties. But one stream of one song actually generates three separate payments, and each one goes to a different place:
If you write your own songs and only have a distributor, you're leaving two of your three royalties uncollected. Registering with the MLC and a PRO fixes that, and if you're still sorting out how music royalties work, start there before you register anything.
The per-stream rates in this article are platform averages, and your streams will pay above or below them depending on your audience. Where your listeners live, how many pay for premium, and the cut your label or distributor takes matters as much as the platform. Essentially, two artists with the same stream count can take home very different money.
For a quick ballpark, multiply your monthly streams by the platform's average rate. For example, 100,000 Spotify streams works out to somewhere between $300 and $500 in recording royalties. If your listeners are mostly US subscribers, expect the high end. If they're mostly free listeners, expect less.
If you don't want to do the math yourself, a streaming royalty calculator will do it for you, and some even let you set the country mix and the premium-versus-free split. Treat any result as an estimate, because real payouts shift with each platform's monthly revenue.
Qobuz pays the most per stream, roughly $0.015 to $0.019 based on its own audited figure, followed by Tidal at $0.013 to $0.015 and Apple Music at $0.007 to $0.01. All three are subscription-only, so there's no free tier pulling the rate down.
Just remember the best rate doesn't mean the biggest check, since Spotify pays less per stream and still pays most artists more in total because many more people use it.
About 230 streams, based on Spotify's average of around $0.004 per stream. You'll get there faster if your listeners are mostly US subscribers, and slower if most of them stream for free or live in cheaper markets.
Yes, a lot less. Premium streams pay around two-and-a-half to three times more on every major platform. Subscribers pay a monthly fee that goes into the pool, while free listeners only bring in ad revenue. On Spotify, premium users are a minority of listeners but bring in about 90% of the money.
Every country has its own revenue pool, based on what subscriptions and ads cost there. A stream from the US or UK can pay several times more than the same song streamed in a cheaper market. Where your fans live often matters more than which platform they're on.
A song that streams steadily, year after year, produces a documented, repeating income. In the investment world, that's an asset, and assets can be valued.
That means you don't have to collect your streaming income one check at a time. A catalog with earning history can be valued, and you can sell a portion of its future income upfront while keeping ownership of your songs. Our guide to how catalog sales work explains the details.
Want to know what your catalog is worth? Get an offer.
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