Google Play Pays Musicians More Per Listen Than Any Other Streaming Service, But Overall Payouts Remain Embarrassing

The pennies musicians earn through streaming services has been a hot topic for a while, but the problem hit the mainstream a couple of years ago when Taylor Swift pulled her catalog out of Spotify, as she despised streaming services that offered free subscriptions. Well, with a new infographic at website Information is Beautiful, we get to see just how bad the situation really is.

The highest-paying streaming service might surprise you: Google Play. It pays $0.0073 per play, which means it’d take 1,400 listens to generate $10. That helps prove the fact that most musicians simply can’t make a living off of streaming alone, and even massive artists would earn less than you’d probably realize. 140,000 listens would be required to earn $1,000, which is equivalent to a 15-song album being listened to 9,300 times.

This infographic has another angle: how many song listens would it take to earn the artist minimum wage? From its get-go, TIDAL promised to pay artists more than any other service, although it falls just behind Google Play with $0.0070 per listen. It’d require a staggering 18% of that service’s users to listen to a track in order to generate a musician minimum wage.

It just gets silly after this point. Beats, which is soon to close, pays $0.0030 per listen, requiring 140% of its subscriber base to partake. Rhapsody (yes, it still exists) pays $0.0019 per listen, which means 33% of its entire subscriber base needs to listen.

While Google Play pays more than any other service, Google’s other mega-service, YouTube, pays out an embarrassing amount: $0.0003 per listen. YouTube has 1 billion viewers, and 1/200 of those would need to listen to a track to give an artist minimum wage.

What this tells us is that if you want to support an artist, it’s not wise to consider streaming as a way to do it. If the album is sold direct, then that’s the best way outside of actually going to see the band live. Streaming services seem to offer a much greater benefit to their users than the content producers.