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With streaming generating over $20 billion in annual revenue for the music industry, the primary way fans consume music today, it's time to highlight the biggest earners.
This page ranks the 200 artists whose catalogs generate the highest revenue on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. The ranking is updated daily with the latest data.
Figures include earnings from all on-demand audio streaming platforms and exclude video streams. They reflect revenue over a 28-day period and represent payouts to rights holders. The share allocated to the artist depends on their contractual agreements.
Top-earning artists on audio streaming
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How streaming platforms pay royalties
Streaming platforms' economic model
Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music retain 30% of their revenue, with the remaining 70% paid to the music industry. This split mirrors the previous iTunes model and is similar to the share that physical retailers historically kept. In contrast, movie theaters often retain 40-50% of ticket sales due to higher operational costs.
An artist's earnings depend on their total streams, but not every stream is worth the same. To understand payouts, it's crucial to examine the pay-per-stream rate and its underlying mechanics.
What is pay per stream, and how is it defined?
Pay per stream represents the royalties paid by streaming platforms for each unique stream. While commonly accepted figures, such as $0.004 per stream on Spotify, are widely cited, they are overly simplistic and incorrect for many cases.
Each platform has multiple pay-per-stream rates because revenue varies by geographical region and subscription plan (e.g., freemium, premium, student, family, bundle). The pay per stream is calculated as follows:
Pay per stream = (group revenue * 70%) / total streams from the group
For example:
- If a group of users generates $1 million in revenue and streams 100 million tracks, the pay per stream of their plays will be $0.007.
- If another group streams the same 100 million tracks but generates only $200,000, their pay per stream will be $0.0014.
For each year, publishing rights owners will typically receive detailed reports showing revenue and stream counts for each group, along with their total earnings.
Let's point out something that does not impact the pay per stream - playlists. It doesn't matter if your fans engage with the music of their favorite singer through their artist page, an album page, a personal playlist or curated playlists, the revenue will not vary.
How much Spotify and similar platforms pay rights owners?
The widely cited $0.004 per stream represents Spotify's average payout in the U.S. This rate is similar in other high-revenue countries and is slightly higher in regions like Scandinavia and the UK due to higher subscription fees. However, pay-per-stream rates can be up to five times lower in countries like India or Argentina.
There is a myth that Apple Music pays more than Spotify. In reality, both platforms use the same 70/30 revenue split and have similar premium pricing in major markets.
The key difference is Spotify’s freemium tier: an artist with one million premium U.S. listeners will earn the same amount on both platforms, but Spotify's additional freemium users contribute a small extra revenue stream. This lowers the overall average but does not reduce the artist’s earnings.
How much money we are speaking about?
Spotify, the largest player in music streaming, paid $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, and a lifetime total nearing $60 billion. This represents roughly half of the $20 billion generated annually by streaming. While a small portion comes from video streaming, the majority originates from audio platforms.
The Swedish platform's Loud & Clear blog publishes annual statistics on how many artists generate earnings above specific thresholds. Below are the figures for 2024:
- $10M+: 70 artists (+10 compared to 2023)
- $5M+: 210 (+40)
- $2M+: 670 (+100)
- $1M+: 1,450 (+200)
- $500K+: 2,940 (+320)
- $100K+: 12,500 (+900)
- $50K+: 22,100 (+1,600)
- $10K+: 71,200 (+5,200)
- $5K+: 110,500 (+7,100)
- $1K+: 274,000 (+14,300)
Methodology and data sources
To provide accurate and up-to-date estimates of artists' streaming revenues, we rely on a structured approach that accounts for platform market shares, regional variations, and industry payout models. Below is an overview of our calculation process.
1. Establishing Spotify’s market share by country
Since Spotify serves as the benchmark for our revenue estimations, we first populate our model with its share among total on-demand audio streams in each country. While Spotify holds 35% of the global premium subscribers - 263 million out of 752 million - its share in the total pool of streams is significantly higher thanks to its freemium users.
This dominance varies significantly by region. In some countries, Spotify accounts for over 95% of total music streams, while in others, local platforms play a more significant role. By incorporating these market share insights, we ensure that our estimates reflect real-world streaming distributions.
2. Retrieving artists’ Spotify streaming data
Our data-gathering streaming tool collects detailed breakdowns for artist’s streams on Spotify. This data is the foundation for our broader estimations across all streaming services. Popular artists are scanned daily, and all artists with streaming presence can be analyzed on demand.
Want to check the detailed streaming numbers for one artist?
3. Estimating total streams across all on-demand audio platforms
Once we determine Spotify's market share in each country, we assess an artist's geographic distribution of streams to estimate total plays across all services.
Using Spotify’s top 50 cities in monthly listeners for each artist gives a valuable input to this task. Then, we use an empirical method based on official charts and certifications to model country-specific streaming behaviors and genre trends.
The combination of these elements provides an estimate for artists’ total number of streams across all audio streaming platforms. This approach ensures that our calculations reflect consumption patterns beyond just Spotify.
4. Determining pay-per-stream rates by country
To estimate revenues accurately, we rely on country-specific pay-per-stream figures. These rates are derived from iGrooveMusic’s industry data, that we adjusted to reflect recent changes in Spotify’s subscription pricing across various markets.
Since payout rates fluctuate based on user demographics (such as premium vs. free-tier listeners), our model exploits' the artist genre and similar artists to incorporate these variations for greater precision.
5. Applying revenue multipliers by country
With both the artist’s stream distribution by country and the pay-per-stream rates per country, we apply the relevant multipliers to calculate earnings. This granular approach guarantees that revenue estimations account for regional discrepancies in payout structures, rather than applying a global average that has no real value to every artist.
6. Calculating total catalog revenues
Summing these adjusted earnings provides the most comprehensive estimate of an artist’s total streaming income across all audio streaming platforms.
Our rankings are updated daily, making this the only tool of its kind offering real-time insights into music royalties.
