And Kaitlyn Tiffany, the only person on staff who streamed enough of one artist to almost pay for a full album, earned One Direction $9.95. Dan Seifert paid Family of the Year $1.05.

Micah Singleton paid Kendrick Lamar $2.94. Here's about how much some other Verge staffers paid their favorite artists (technically, the rights holders) this year. And I'm paying Spotify's $10 per month subscription fee if I were relying on its free, ad-supported tier, the payout for artists would be even smaller. I listened to 13,000 minutes of music on Spotify this year, which means I paid around one-tenth of a cent per minute. My most-streamed track of the year was The-Dream’s 'That’s My Shit,' and I’m sure Terius Nash appreciated the 27 pennies that earned him.

So the band is getting even less than that. And that $2.24 is distributed among the music's 'rights holders,' which includes labels and publishers. 0084, which means I paid Built to Spill somewhere around $2.24 for an entire year of music. Using the upper limit of Spotify’s estimated payout, that would be 267 x. My top artist of the year was Built to Spill, whose songs (mostly from There's Nothing Wrong with Love) I streamed 267 times over the course of 2015. I paid $2.24 for a year of Built to Spill Still, Spotify admits the average 'per stream' payout to rights holders lands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084. Other factors also come into play, like the country in which a song was streamed and the currency value in that country. And not all artists get the same cut of Spotify revenue either: depending on their contracts with the label, some musicians might only recoup 15 to 20 percent of the streaming revenue they brought in. Major labels likely receive a sizable sum from Spotify, but not all of that money is going to artists. With Year in Music, Spotify has unintentionally given users a tool for determining their monetary value as a fan - at least when it comes to streaming.Įarlier this year when The Verge obtained a copy of Sony’s Spotify contract, we noted that Spotify uses a complex formula to determine the royalties artists earn from streams. But Year in Music’s quantitative breakdown inherently raises questions about what your stream count really means for artists, i.e., how much money you’re actually paying them. Your most-streamed track might make you reconsider your choice to put that Rae Sremmurd song on every playlist. Your most-streamed artist might remind you of those weird couple of months you spent staring at the ceiling listening to Kate Bush. On the surface, Spotify’s new interactive ' Year in Music' feature is a pretty fun way to look back at your 2015 listening habits.

Popullar music artists 2015