How Much Did Spotify Pay Me For 1,556,335 Streams

My song Chains has generated 1,556,335 streams, but how much money did this actually generate? In this post i’ll walk you through where these streams came from, what countries and calculate the average payment per stream.

Background & Streaming Services

We released Chains around September of 2020 and ran an initial marketing budget of $600 using a Facebook conversion campaign over a 4 week period. Then around January 2021 I relaunched another campaign after seeing how well the song was doing and how we’d made most of our money back.

From there I left this campaign running at a small budget for 12-16 months. Most of the streams came from algorithmic playlists triggered by the ad campaign, specifically Discover Weekly.

I do want to point out this wasn’t 100% Spotify. Here’s how things broke down:

• Spotify: 1.42 Million
• Apple Music: 75,000
• YouTube Music: 50,000
• Deezer: 10,000
• Amazon Music: 10,000

Streaming by Country

Before we talk about how much money was brought in and the average cost per stream, we need to talk about what countries actually streamed the song. Music streaming services don’t pay the same per stream in every country. Places like the United States and United Kingdom pay a lot more than Brazil or Mexico. India and Phillippinnes pays much less than most countries.

Here’s some of the top countries and how many streams the song got from them.

Most of the streams were from the United States so we’d expect the cost per stream to be on the higher side. However there is another variable…

Spotify pays a different rate depending on if the user listening is on a free plan or a paid plan. They even pay differently if it’s a full priced plan, a student plan or a family plan. This information wasn’t available for me to track so we have to ignore it for now.

How Much Money From Streaming

Alright, time for what you came here for!

From 1,556,335 streams our song Chains made $4,040.16. If you do the math it comes to an average payment of $0.0026 per streams, or 0.26 cents per stream.

The number that’s generally thrown around online is $0.0035 per stream or 0.35 cents per stream. From our country spread you’d actually expect for the rate to be on the higher side, so i’m guessing that we had a higher percentage of free users. That, or the published numbers other people talk about are wrong / outdated.

In total we spent around $3,500 on this song, so we actually made money. Additionally the song continues to make around $35 per month without any additional ad spend.

Check out my video on this for more information:

If you want to learn exactly how I run campaign like this so you can do it yourself, my course Spotify Growth Machine takes you through the entire process from start to finish.