As a musician, arranger, producer, composer, etc. I am always curious to know what music is providing the most revenue and what music service is best for distribution. I know a lot of people complain about Spotify’s super low streaming royalty rate for example, and I figured I could use data and insights from my own music to help educate others on the facts.
As of writing this, here are some of the top music streaming services and their respective royalty rates:
Spotify: $0.003 – $0.005 per stream
Apple Music: $0.01 per stream
Tidal: $0.01284 per stream
Amazon Music: $0.004 per stream
YouTube Music: $0.00069 to $0.008 per stream
Looking at these values alone, it appears that Apple Music and Tidal are the highest-paying services. But the question remains: When looking at monthly revenue reports, which service ends up paying artists the most money? Do musicians get enough streams on Apple Music and Tidal to earn them more than Amazon Music and Spotify? This is one question I’d like to answer.
Another question is more personal – Which of my music tracks are earning the most money each month in 2025? I want to check the last quarter’s worth of statements (April, May, and June) to determine what releases are performing well and what I should avoid making more of.
First, let’s take a look at my monthly revenue for these months. Below are the charts to demonstrate how much money each music service paid me per month.
Note: these monthly statements from Soundrop (my distributor) are on a delay. April’s statement will include revenue from December-Feb depending on the service and so on. The below graphs were made using Tableau.
As evident in these charts, Spotify is my #1 music service in terms of revenue each month. It is kind of crazy to see the disparity between Spotify and the #2 service (Amazon Music Unlimited). Even with Spotify Discovery taking a cut of promoted releases’ royalties, it averages to be at least 10x more than Amazon. That is quite interesting to me. This just goes to show that even with Spotify’s low streaming royalty rate, the sheer amount of users on the platform means you have a much higher potential to get more streams and earn good revenue.
Let’s look at it with even more data (yay numbers):
Spotify: over 678 million users (taken from company site)
Apple Music: 95 million users (June 2024)
Tidal: 5 million users
Amazon Music: 80 million users
YouTube Music: 100 million users
You can clearly see what I mean now. The fact that Spotify has nearly 7x the amount of users as Apple Music or YouTube Music speaks volumes as to which platform is the most popular and has the highest reach. So, boycott the service if you want, but you will be seriously missing out on some great revenue if you do.
Now, I am fairly lucky to have over 200 releases under my name, and the vast majority of these tracks are music covers. This means my earning potential is already higher than people such as indie composers and home studio producers. I want to point this out because there are many factors that can affect someone’s prospective revenue. What I share here could be completely different from your own experience, and I would love to collate more data from other musicians to find trends and disparities later on!
All that being said, let’s look at my individual releases for the same statement months and see what my top earners are. These graphs only represent releases that have earned me at least $1 in that statement month. I have also sorted it in descending order to make it easier to read.
Once again, the top earner is the same each month! My Land of Morytha cover (from Xenoblade Chronicles 2) has over 400,000 streams on Spotify, and it was released quite a while ago at the end of 2018. In the past quarter alone, it gained over 50,000 streams! I also want to point out that 2 of the top 5 tracks are both from Xenoblade Chronicles 2. However, these were both released in 2018 and are on older playlists that still rack up streams. I recently made a XC2 cover of Desolation (released March 2025) to see how it’d perform, and it has not even reached 1,000 streams yet. So, while some of my older XC2 content is doing well, my more recent covers don’t even come close to being profitable. The good news is, this can absolutely change with more time!
Another good thing to take note of when making music covers is the timeliness of the cover with a game release. I unfortunately do not have any covers from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 yet but I’d be curious to see how those covers are performing for other musicians. You can also take advantage of OSTs that are not already on streaming platforms, as people will actively seek out covers instead (which I believe is a big reason why my older XC2 covers continue to do well – the official OST is nowhere to be found on Spotify).
That is all for now, but I look forward to making another blog post with updated numbers and graphs later this year. Have questions or comments? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to drop a line below! Happy music-making 🙂
-Tera