Apple Music pays a penny per stream on average

Escalating a battle with Spotify.

Apple Music ’s payment rate for artists and labels is a penny per stream on average, according to a letter from the company posted on its artist dashboard, viewed by UFABET999.com and first reported by the Wall Street Journal. (And now posted in full at 9to5 Mac.) That payment rate is higher than Spotify, which has a confusing variable rate scheme that basically tops out at a half-penny per stream. Apple says in the letter that its rates vary by subscription plan and country but average to a penny-per-stream.

Announcing an average penny-per-stream rate is a nice PR win for Apple Music, since it is 1. very simple and 2. Spotify hates talking about its per-stream payments, which the company insists are a misleading figure. Seriously, it just launched an entire website called Loud&Clear last month designed to help artists and fans understand how payments work, and a good chunk of it is devoted to explaining why per-stream rates are not the right thing to focus on. It’s a lot of copy like this:

In the streaming era, fans do not pay per song and services do not pay per stream, so we don’t believe a “per stream rate” is a meaningful number to analyze. Still, we understand that artists find it useful to calculate an effective “per stream” rate or, in other words, a revenue-to-streams ratio — dividing the total size of the royalty pool on Spotify (the numerator) by the total number of music streams on Spotify (the denominator). Both of these numbers are growing incredibly quickly every year.

There are a number of factors that contribute to that ratio looking small, which we understand can seem problematic.