Calculate your real streaming royalties across Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, and Deezer. Our calculator uses volume-adjusted tier rates instead of flat averages — because your actual per-stream rate depends on how many streams you get.
Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream in 2026. The exact rate depends on your monthly stream volume and your audience's ratio of Premium to Free-tier listeners. Artists with more than 500,000 monthly streams typically earn 10-15% more per stream than micro-artists, because their listener base skews toward paid subscribers.
It's not that Spotify "pays more" to bigger artists. The difference comes from audience composition. Premium subscribers generate 3-4x more revenue per stream than free-tier listeners. Artists with larger audiences tend to have a higher percentage of Premium listeners, which raises their effective per-stream rate.
Streaming royalties take 32-97 days to reach your wallet, depending on your distributor. The delay happens in two stages: the streaming platform (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) reports earnings to your distributor with a 1-2 month lag, then your distributor processes the payment. DistroKid is typically fastest (32-79 days), while TuneCore and CD Baby take longer (63-97 days).
This calculator uses volume-adjusted tier rates calibrated against 9 months of verified independent label payout data. Unlike other calculators that use a single flat rate, we apply a multiplier based on your stream volume: Micro (<10K streams): 0.80x, Small (10K-100K): 0.90x, Mid (100K-500K): 1.00x, Large (500K-1M): 1.10x, Major (1M+): 1.15x. This reflects the real-world pattern where per-stream rates increase with scale.