Believe it or not, the answer to the question “How many monthly listeners to make a living from Spotify” is surprisingly complex and interesting. I encourage you to read this article to learn why, but if you’re looking for the TLDR, here it is:
To make a living off of Spotify streams alone, you typically need about 200k-800k monthly listeners. It varies depending on your cost of living, which countries listen to your music the most, how engaged your fanbase and which distributor you use. If you have a record label, a manager, a producer, a distribution deal or band members that need a cut of the profits it’s going to drastically increase this number is well.
In this article i’m going to walk you through three example artists of different sizes to cover roughly how much they make from Spotify each month.
The Real World Economics Of Music Streaming
I could rattle off random numbers, but I feel it makes it much more tangible if I use actual artists I know and have access to their Spotify For Artists data. Many artists feel like hitting numbers this large is impossible, but the reality is there are a ton of people pulling it off.
Example Artist A:
Our first example artist is an alt-pop artist with about 90k monthly listeners. They get 311k streams per month currently, and since most of the streams are coming from the US this translates into about $1,030 per month (assuming $0.00333 per stream, or 1/3rd of a penny per stream).
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Example Artist B:
Our next example artist is a hard rock / alternative metal band with about 333k monthly listeners, and 1.23 million streams per month currently. This artist also has a largely ‘tier 1’ based fanbase, with US and Germany being the largest countries, so we’ll also assume 1/3rd of a penny per stream. This translates into about $4,100 per month from Spotify.
Wondering how Saves and Playlist Adds come into the picture? Read my post about Intent Rate.
Example Artist C:
This artist is an adult contemporary artist with 1.4 million monthly listeners and 6.5 million monthly streams. Their audience has a lot more Philippines and Indonesia, but USA is 2nd and Canada is 4th, so i’m going to assume a rate of $0.002 per stream. This results in about $13,000 per month from Spotify.
Analysis
Alright now that you’ve seen these example artists, I want to talk a bit more about them in relation to one another. The end results were that our 3 examples were making $1k, $4k and $13k per month from Spotify alone.
| Artist | Revenue |
| Example Artist A | $1,030 |
| Example Artist B | $4,100 |
| Example Artist C | $13,000 |
However this isn’t the whole picture. The context matters. Spotify may be the largest streaming platform today, but that doesn’t mean artists don’t have significant revenue from other platforms. Additionally, artists may have splits on the percentages they’re earning back from labels, managers, producers, distributors, band members etc.
For Example Artist C, Spotify is one of their smaller streaming platforms, but they also have fractions of their catalog with various labels deals and distribution deals in addition to independent releases. This means their gross revenue is several multiples of their Spotify revenue, but there are also more splits involved so the artist doesn’t get the whole thing.
Example Artist A gets roughly 90% of their streaming revenue from Spotify each month, and part of their catalog is with various labels, there are producer cuts, management cuts etc. Example Artist B has maybe 70% from Spotify, but much more of their catalog is independent and they have much fewer splits. However, they are a band so they split the revenue amongst the members.
Keep mind this isn’t the only revenue source for artists. Not only is there publishing and mechanical royalties that contributes about another 15% increase in streaming income, but artists have many income sources not related to streaming. For example, sync licensing, live music, merch, physical media, memberships etc. In many cases these other revenue sources will be greater than streaming revenue.
I’m bringing this all up because I want to illustrate how complicated streaming economics can be, and how it can vary between different artists. You truly never know on the outside how an artist is doing financially. Artists typically rely on several income sources to pay their bills, and this diversity can give them stability in income throughout the year.
Both artists B and C have been making a living from their music for at least 15 years.
So…
How many monthly listeners to make a living?
Artists really get paid in streams, not in monthly listeners. Additionally the amount of money each stream is worth varies depending on the country it came from, the plan the user is subscribed to, and even the music distributor the artist uses. Oh, and guess what. The value of a stream changes every month to.
The internet says that in Massachusetts USA in 2025 you need about $64,000 per year to cover your cost of living. Massachusetts is an expensive state to live in, so if you live someplace much cheaper then adjust your numbers accordingly.
Assuming a payment per stream of 1/3rd of a penny, you’d need 19.2 million streams per year to live in Massachusetts. This is assuming you have no splits, label cuts, management cuts, distribution cuts, Discovery Mode cuts etc. subtracting from this stream pool. This translates to 1.6 million streams per month.
Most artists have a stream per listener of between 3 and 6, so let’s assume we’ll use 4 streams per listener as our number. Then we can calculate our final answer… 400k monthly listeners. However if you only need $32k per year to live instead of $64k per year, you would only need 200k monthly listeners. If you have a worse stream per listener, or most of your streams are from lower paying countries, you might need 800k monthly listeners. Therefore…
To make a living off of Spotify streams alone, you need about 200k-800k monthly listeners. It varies depending on your cost of living, which countries listen to your music the most, how engaged your fanbase and which distributor you use.
FAQ
I want to address a few questions I think you’ll have.
How much does Spotify pay per stream?
You may be wondering where i’ve gotten my payment per stream information from. I calculated it from my royalty checks from my own music projects, and music signed to my label. Let’s take a look at an analysis I ran on my DistroKid sales report comparing average payment per stream on several of the largest DSPs, for the United States, United Kindgom, Brazil and Canada.
Keep in mind this data changes constantly, and it can vary by plan and distributor. For example using a royalty statement exported from The Orchard (another distributor), I calculated that Spotify premium streams in the USA paid $0.0041 per stream while ad supported free-tier streams in the USA pay $0.0030. This means that the ratio of premium to free users can drastically change your overall average Spotify pay per stream.
This data also showed an interesting trend, take a look at this infographic:
The US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and UK all typically work great for running Meta ads to promote songs on streaming platforms. So it makes sense why over 2/3rds of streams are coming from premium users in those countries.
India can be a tricky country to advertise to using Meta ads for music promotion. A lot of the time I run ads there the conversions don’t translate to streams, however if I send them to a playlist it translates to streams. Since free users on Spotify can’t listen to any song they want on mobile (it plays their artist radio instead), and India has streams from 78% of users on free plans (at least for this royalty statement), it makes sense why driving them to a song wouldn’t work. But, free users can shuffle any playlist they want, so it makes sense why using a playlist would solve the problem.
I wouldn’t use this data to represent the actual percentages of free to premium users in a given country, because this is just for a handful of artists over Q3 in 2023. Additionally it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy that we’ll get mostly premium streams given that it’s harder to get free users to listen to a specific song, since they can’t listen to any song they want and they can only shuffle playlists. After that, algorithmic playlists will play a larger role in influencing free vs premium stream ratios.
Can you live off of music streaming?
Yes! But it’s hard, and it depends on a lot of factors. First off, some people need $80k per year to live and other people can survive just fine on $20k. Next, if you need to split income with other band members, a label, a manager, a distributor, etc. then you’re going to need much more streams than a solo artist who works alone and promotes his own music.
Keep in mind that it often costs money to market your music enough to hit anywhere near the numbers needed to make a living. It also costs money to make music in the first place, unless you do everything yourself and have a home studio.
I know at least 100 artists making a living off of mostly (or solely) music streaming platforms, and most commonly Spotify is the largest part of that. I know at least 1,000 people making a living from music in general, when you include all of their other music-related income sources. Keep in mind this includes sync licensing, recording and mixing / mastering work, session work, teaching, content creators in music etc, in addition to things like touring, merchandise, membership platforms etc.
Do you need to make a living from streaming?
Nope, you don’t need to make a living from music streaming. Artists always have multiple income sources and it’s not unusual for one or more to be larger than streaming. This could be touring, merchandise, sync licensing, membership platforms and much more. Even aside from that, let’s say you have a day job but start making $500 per month profit from music streaming: it may enable you to work less hours so you have more time to invest in your music. Or help with some bills, or beef up that savings account and retirement fund.
Many artists treat their music streaming like a discovery platform more than anything else. Just like how you post content on social media to reach an audience, you have your music on streaming sites to make it super easy to consume your music, and those streaming platforms have algorithms that push your music to people they think will enjoy it. Then over time the super fans will develop, and they’ll come out to shows, buy VIP packages, purchase merch, sign up for a monthly behind the scenes membership etc.
It is a very normal scenario for people to start off funding their music career with their non-music career. It can take years of work to get a project off of the ground and have it start generating income. Running ads and stuff exponentially increases your fan growth compared to most free tactics, but there is a good chance you won’t profit financially from the promotion because streaming just doesn’t pay that well. The songs that do profit typically profit over a period of several years.
With Spotify promotion the goal is often to grow a song significantly enough to where the algorithmic playlists promote your song at scale.
