Apple’s music service pays musicians double what archrival Spotify does to stream each song to subscribers.
This amount doesn’t directly affect users of either service, but it might make some people consider using the service that sends artists more money.
Apple sent Music publishers a letter on Friday. This said that musicians receive a penny per stream, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Spotify recently created a website to show its subscribers how much it pays artists. This doesn’t give a definite per-stream rate because that’s not how the service does things. Musicians get a share of the total revenue generated by Spotify in each country based on the artist’s percentage of all streams in that country. But according to the WSJ, “Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream.”
Just because each Apple Music customer is indirectly contributing more to musicians, the musicians don’t automatically earn twice as much in total from Apple Music. Spotify has more customers. At the end of 2020, there were 155 million paying subscribers and 190 million users on the free option. Apple hasn’t publicly updated its customer numbers since June 2019 when it had 60 million paying subscribers. Its service doesn’t include a free tier.
