The Process
In this section, we break down how streaming royalties actually work, from how revenue is generated, to how it flows through the system, to how artists’ royalties are calculated.
How the Money Flows
One of the questions we get asked most often is: How do artists and songwriters get paid?
We break it down in the videos below:
Streaming royalties are the foundation, but they’re just the beginning. Today’s artists are building sustainable careers through discovery on Spotify that leads to touring, merch, sync deals, and more.
Streaming Numbers in Context
Here’s how it works: Artists get paid based on their share of total streams on Spotify. If your music accounts for 1% of all streams, you get roughly 1% of the royalty pool (that’s what people mean when they talk about “streamshare”). To make this real: In 2025, artists who accounted for 1 in every 1 million streams on Spotify generated over $11,000, on average. Let’s put streaming numbers into context.
What might have been a lot of streams even five years ago looks pretty different today. In fact, more than 400,000 songs were streamed more than a million times in 2025 alone. It would take more than 2.5 years of nonstop listening to hear them all.
Enter any monthly listener count for an artist or all-time stream count for a song to estimate how each number compares with all artists and songs on Spotify.
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based on 2025 data
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based on 2025 data