Spotify and Apple Music are at the top of the streaming music services. Although the listening base is growing on Apple Music, Spotify is still king. With more than 150 million Premium users and more than 250 million users under listening with advertising, it leads an increasingly competitive market in which artists demand much more economic relevance. In a press release sent by Apple Music to artists, producers and record companies, the payment method for the service has been confirmed and it turns out that the Big Apple pays one cent of the dollar for each reproduction made.
Apple pays a penny per listen, double what Spotify pays
La note by Apple Music was born for several reasons. First, in response to the one published by Spotify a few weeks ago where it explained how its service rewarded artists. Second, to continue to maintain healthy transparency between Apple Music and artists, an important mission of those from Cupertino who have stressed on several occasions that it is very important to them. And, finally, to try to attract the artistic collective to invest more and more in exclusive content on Apple's music streaming service.
One penny for every listen it's what Apple Music pays the artist. However, not all the bulk of this money goes to the artist himself, but there are intermediaries: the record company, publishers, advertisers, etc. If we compare it with the way Spotify pays we see that it is almost double since Spotify pays between a third and a half cent of a dollar for each listen. However, the end result is that Spotify generates much more income from the large active user base it has.
Finally, we must also highlight the origin of payments by Apple Music that comes intrinsically from the payment of the subscription by the users. While Spotify has a large part of advertisers who pay to appear as ads to the more than 250 million users who do not pay for the Premium service.