Photo Credit: NMPA / Alexander Grey
NMPA president and CEO David Israelite unveils the latest per-stream songwriter and publisher payout across Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and Amazon.
In a post on LinkedIn, National Music Publishers’ Association President and CEO David Israelite unveiled the latest per-stream songwriter and publisher payout. These numbers represent both mechanical and publishing sub-licenses across Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Notably, YouTube is not at the bottom of that barrel.
“How much is 1 million streams worth to the songwriters who make these businesses possible? And remember—most songs are written by 4-5 songwriters, so this amount is split among all of the writers and publishers,” Israelite wrote, noting in an email to Digital Music News that this data from the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is only inclusive of the U.S., across both mechanical and performance payouts.
Specifically, Spotify’s free, ad-supported tier saw a payout of $800, while individual paid Spotify accounts raked in $1,346. Individual YouTube accounts led to a payout of $2,159; individual Apple accounts amounted to $2,367, while individual Amazon accounts led to a payout of $3,743.
Already, A&R representatives and others across the industry are speaking out about those numbers, noting that they represent broader issues across the royalty payout structure.
“Not enough!” exclaimed Chad Doerge, President and Deputy CEO at Round Hill Music. “The music industry provides an incredible service to consumers via the DSPs. Unlike SVOD [subscription video on-demand], where content is exclusive and gets split between so many different services, each music DSP has virtually every song ever recorded as an on-demand utility. Yet Spotify charges roughly half what most SVOD services charge.”
“The split you flagged is the heart of it, and from the A&R seat there’s a structural reason it lands on songwriters specifically. That 4-5 way split only happens on the publishing side. And publishing is already the smaller slice of the payout before a single writer sees anything; the recording takes the larger share,” wrote Robert Bär, A&R manager and co-founder of Yoke Music. “The recording side also doesn’t fragment when a song picks up a fifth co-writer. One master, one collection point—however, many writers are in the room.”
“The economics quietly penalize exactly the kind of [collaborative] writing that defines current music. And that’s before the per-stream value itself keeps eroding as the pool splits across an exploding number of tracks,” Bär added. “The songwriter ends up at the bottom of a pool that’s shrinking per stream and dividing more ways at the same time. Hard to design a worse seat in the stack.”
“A big part of the reason I moved away from the dream of being an artist into the doldrums of sales,” lamented producer and composer Aaron Leeder, who also works in sales and business development at B2B community platform Pavilion.
“If the earnings are like this in the U.S., imagine what they’re like in countries such as Brazil,” said João Luccas Caracas, CEO and founder of Adaggio. “This needs to change ASAP.”
