"Terrifying" figures show how many streams an artist needs to earn minimum wage

A chart displaying how many streams are required across each of the leading platforms in order for an artist to earn an hour’s UK minimum wage for those aged 25 and over (£8.72).

The data has been collated by Twitter user @thetrichordist and shared in a table by the Director of royalties collection service PRS for Music, Tom Gray, who called the figures “Terrifying”.

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Amazon tops the table from an artist’s perspective, paying out on average £0.009 per stream, which equates to 111 streams to earn one pound, and 970 needed to earn an hour’s UK minimum wage.

YouTube ranks the lowest with an average payout of £0.0012 per stream, meaning 833 are needed to earn a pound, and 7,267 to make an hour’s UK minimum wage.

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Other platforms ranked are Tidal, Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play Music, Spotify and Pandora.

As Tom Gray noted, these figures reflect “the total rate if you own all the rights”, whereas most music has a number of rights holders taking a cut.

He added: “On a major label the artist earns 20% of this (after debt repayment) and the songwriter (if she writes 100%), at best, 8-15% of each rate.”

[Via: NME]

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Features Editor, follow him on Twitter