An independent music producer L.Dre posted a video on YouTube to show the difference between the royalties he receives from Apple Music and Spotify for his music. With almost the same number of streams, Apple Music pays 3x more than Spotify in royalties.
In 2021, Apple Music shared that it paid one cent per stream to singers, musicians, record labels, or other rights holders which is much higher than rates offered by rival audio streaming platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, and YouTube Music. The streamer paid $163 million in royalties to artists that year.
Tidal pays the highest $0.013 rate and Spotify pays $0.0033, one of the lowest compensation rates.
Music producer highlights artist get paid better on Apple Music but enjoy additional features on Spotify
As explained in the L.Dre video, Apple Music pays $1000 per 100,000 streams but Spotify pays $1000 per 303,030 streams. Using stats of two of his hit songs on both platforms with over 4 million streams, he received $11,683 from Spotify and $24, 200 from Apple Music.
Even with a low compensation rate, the music producer said that Spotify is better for independent artists like him because of its additional features.
Spotify has over 162 million paid subscribers while Apple Music has 78.6 million subscribers. At the end of the day, Spotify does have way more users and actually a lot better features for at least independent artists like myself.
You can actually pitch to playlist every time you release a song and you know they got Shopify integrations, artist bios, you can upload images, connect playlists that you made onto your artist profile.. The features for Spotify are much better for artists compared to Apple Msuic which is just now getting a few new features actually but it’s still far far behind Spotify for artists.
Previously, Apple Music allowed artists to share their notable milestones on social media platforms and added customization options for artists’ profile pages. Using Shazam’s voice recognition tech, the audio streamer also introduced DJ mixes on the service as an opportunity to welcome more artists.
However, L.Dre believes those changes are not enough and Apple has to work on additional features to offer to artists, along with attractive royalties. His sincere advice for artists was to try all platforms and not just focus on one single platform to expand their reach.
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