howmuchperstream.com is built by Nik McFly, independent music industry analyst.
Every streaming calculator on the internet uses a flat per-stream rate — usually something like "Spotify pays $0.004 per stream." That number is misleading. Your actual per-stream rate depends on how many streams you get, because larger artists have more Premium listeners, and Premium streams pay 3-4x more.
We built this calculator to give artists a more accurate picture. Our volume-adjusted tier model is based on 9 months of verified payout data from an independent label distributed through UnitedMasters.
Base rates are updated quarterly from publicly available industry data and cross-referenced with our own verified payouts. The tier multipliers (0.80x for micro to 1.15x for major) are derived from observed patterns in real payout data across different stream volume levels.
Questions about methodology or data? Reach out via Telegram.