From this Wall Street Journal article published on Friday:
Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream, according to a letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service’s artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, reflects music-streaming services’ increasing efforts to show they are artist-friendly. Apple Inc.’s move can be seen as a riposte to Spotify Technology SA, which last month shared some details of how it pays the music industry for streams on its platform.
Apple’s penny-per-stream payment structure—which music-industry experts say can dip lower—is roughly double what Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming service, pays music-rights holders per stream.
You can read the full letter in this 9to5Mac post.
The headline link is to a response to the “Apple Music pays twice what Spotify does” narrative. From that Variety article:
The per-stream rate is addressed in a brief paragraph in the letter, which reads in full: “Our average per play rate is $0.01. While royalties from streaming services are calculated on a stream share basis, a play still has a value. This value varies by subscription plan and country but averaged $0.01 for Apple Music individual paid plans in 2020. This includes label and publisher royalties.” (It does not provide details on how that average was reached.)
And:
The first sentence of the WSJ article reads: “Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream” — which does not specify who it pays a penny per stream — and while the main headline on the article reads, “Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays When You Stream a Song,” a secondary headline reads, “Apple Music pays artists twice as much as Spotify per stream.”
OK. So far, looks like Apple pays artists a penny per stream. But read on:
Streaming services rarely pay artists directly: They pay rights-holders, usually labels and publishers, which take their cut and then pay artists their share.
And:
In reality, there are far too many factors involved in streaming royalties to be boiled down to a single, simple formula: In addition to the subscription plan, the country of origin, the number of users on the site and multiple other factors, some labels may have different deals with different streaming services. In one of its veiled digs at Spotify, Apple Music states in its letter that it pays “the same 52% headline rate to all labels”; sources tell Variety that Spotify has different deals with different labels, although specifics were not readily available. (In the U.S., publishing rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board and ostensibly are the same for all music-streaming services.)
Read the Variety article, draw your own conclusions. Feels like, at the very least, the Wall Street Journal “Apple Music pays artists twice as much as Spotify per stream” take is oversimplifying a complex payment model.
