This chart was published on LinkedIn by Italian producer Pieradis Rossini and lists the potential earnings from streaming your music across various platforms.

What it shows is the staggeringly low amounts the streaming services pay the artist for their music. At the same time many of these streaming services are getting very wealthy, Spotify alone is currently worth $33.27 billion.

Just think about that for a moment. At the same as they pay me $0.00437 for each stream of one of my songs they are basking in a current market valuation of £33.27 billion. Just to reiterate the point, that’s BILLION not million.

For context there’s around 100,000 new tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. That’s every day !!! Most of them will never earn any money at all. It’s estimated that around 4 million tracks on Spotify have never had any plays at all – none. Think about that, not even the artist who uploaded the track has bothered to listen to it. Do musicians value their work so little? No wonder Spotify feel it’s OK to pay $0.00437 for each stream.

Spotify is estimated to have around 515 million active users currently so you have to ask the question why don’t they pay artists more? The answer, I fear, is simple, they don’t have to. Unlike the current organised strike action in Hollywood there’s no way that musicians across the globe will organise sufficiently to worry the streaming services, and the streaming services know it.

So next time you stream a song just remember, the artist is getting paid $0.00437 and isn’t getting rich or probably even covering the cost of producing that music.

You could help by listening to more music and by sharing the music you like across your social media, here’s a link to my music to get you started….