As an indipendent artist, novelist, musician i have a lot of experience and data related to self publishing platform and services collected and analyzed.

Regarding Streaming Music platforms, such as AppleMusic, AmazonMusic, Spotify, Tidal, Soundcloud, etc.. i have collected, analyzed and summerized this report about the royalties an artist can expect from them.

After an entire year of real data reports i have calculated this chart (in $) about “pay per stream” for each of the big players of the streaming music market:

#platformpay per 1 streampay per 1000 streamsrank
1Tidal0.01111.00😁
2Soundcloud HighTier0.01010.00😁
3Napster0.00828.20😄
4AmazonMusic0.00828.20😄
5AppleMusic0.00737.30😊
6YoutubeMusic0.00292.91😐
7Spotify0.00181.80🙁
8Deezer0.00111.10☹️
8Soundcloud FreeTier0.00020.20☹️

As you can see, the best players for Artists and winners for 2020 are Tidal, Soundcloud High Tier (paid subscriptions), Napster, Amazon Music and AppleMusic.

Despite of the fact that Spotify and Youtube have the largest audiences, they are mostly at the bottom by the Artist’s point of view. Also, Deezer has a very low payback. A part, Soundcloud Free Tier, has a very low fee, but has a potential huge listeners base.

Another negative aspect about Soundcloud free tier, Deezer, Spotify and YoutubeMusic is that they have a free plan, heavily Ad supported, version of their music players. This is not a good thing for artists, mainly independent ones, because to have a significant amount of royalties means to have millions, if not tens of millions of streamings coming from a very fragmented and volatile audience. Practically impossible.

Any good news?
Yes! Some good news are coming from the Sync programs offered by TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube, mainly from the new TikTok platform, half a billion of active users sharing small video all based on music.

Sincerely Yours,
Dino Olivieri.

Listen or buy my music at:

BANDCAMP: https://onyrix.bandcamp.com/
APPLEMUSIC: https://itunes.apple.com/it/artist/dino-olivieri/1240985436
AMAZONMUSIC: https://music.amazon.it/artists/B008LZ0DR6/CATALOG
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/artist/8748420
NAPSTER: https://it.napster.com/artist/dino-olivieri
YANDEXMUSIC: https://music.yandex.ru/artist/5140846
YTMUSIC: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCr1ATX6fpE2omwTyzFssVFg
SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Hauw8vELo4AL6S0LVpB3W
SHAZAM: https://www.shazam.com/it/artist/204567266/onyrix
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/OlivieriDino/
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/user/onyrix
SOUNDCLOUD: https://soundcloud.com/onyrix