from Hacker News

Spotify Royalty Calculator

by bartoszhernas on 10/25/22, 9:58 AM with 12 comments

  • by mdrzn on 10/25/22, 1:11 PM

    GOD, this is so wrong. The "calculator" doesn't take account of country of origin for the listener, if it's free or premium account, or any other amount of arbitrary measures that Spotify uses to calculate the average, which they even explain two paragraphs down:

    >>"So, many factors that come into play and it’s impossible to guarantee how much you will make from your streams."

    So what's the point of the calculator?

    By the way Spotify earnings vary WILDLY month by month based on your listeners. Sometimes it's 0.00005€ per play and sometimes it's 100x that.

    Source: I have about 400k+ plays on Spotify

  • by mbsumpter on 10/25/22, 12:08 PM

    I would love to know how these figures compare to revenue's made from albums pre-online streaming.

    It used to be the case that albums were the main money maker for artists, and going on tour supported the album sales.

    E.G Queen didn't turn a profit on a world tour until something like 1985. However profited hugely on their album sales.

    It tends to be the reverse now where most artists do not gain as much from artists, and touring tends to be the money maker, and now the album is to help sell tickets for the tour.

  • by rossmohax on 10/25/22, 10:26 AM

    I know Spotify divides all money between all artists, regardless of what user actually listened. It is one big pot for both sides. Is there a service with (in my view) more fair model, where my monthly subscription is divided only between artists I actually listened in a month?

  • by saaaaaam on 10/25/22, 7:55 PM

    I used to run one of the biggest territories in the world for one of the biggest digital music distributors in the world.

    This is a very blunt estimator based on questionable data and questionable assumptions about the listeners.

  • by pilotneko on 10/25/22, 12:27 PM

    This seems…wrong? Doesn’t YouTube Music pay $0.008 per stream? According to this calculator, it’s much less? Is there some kind of nonlinear payout schedule for YouTube Music?

  • by c7b on 10/25/22, 10:50 AM

    Would be interesting where they get their data from, wasn't entirely clear to me.