Free tool · for listeners
Where your subscription actually goes
You pay the same amount every month. You probably assume it gets shared out between the artists you played. It doesn't, and the way it actually works is stranger than most people expect.
1. What you pay and how you listen
Whatever your plan costs. Currency doesn't matter, the maths is the same.
Roughly. About 40 a day is average for a heavy listener.
Percent. If one artist is 15% of your listening, put 15.
Their rough share of all streams on the platform. Illustrative bands, not measured figures.
2. Where it lands
3. What your favourite artist got from you
The same listening, under the model that exists and the model that doesn't.
The left figure moves with the artist-size band you picked, because under pro-rata that is the only thing that decides it. The right figure moves with your listening. That is the entire difference.
Why your listening doesn't decide anything
Spotify, and every other major service, uses what's called a pro-rata or streamshare model. Every subscription and every advert in a given month goes into one pot. Rights holders are then paid out of that pot according to their share of all streams on the whole platform, not according to who paid.
Your money is not spent on the music you played. It is added to a pot, and the pot is divided by everybody else's listening.
Spotify describes it plainly in its own artist documentation: streamshare is worked out "by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder."
The consequence is the bit worth sitting with. If you spend a month listening to one independent rapper and nothing else, almost none of your money reaches them. It goes into the pot, and the pot pays out overwhelmingly to whoever was streamed most globally that month. You could cancel every other artist out of your life and it would barely move their payment.
The alternative nobody has adopted at scale
The obvious other option is called user-centric: your subscription is divided between the artists you actually played. It is not a fringe idea, it is just not what the major platforms do. The comparison above is what that difference is worth to one artist, from one listener, in one month.
What this model simplifies, deliberately. The platform's cut and the recording-versus-publishing split are industry norms rather than published contract terms, and they vary by deal, country and platform. This tool applies commonly cited figures and shows them as such. It also stops at the rights holder: what reaches the artist personally depends on their label or distributor deal, which is a separate and usually much larger deduction. Treat every number here as the shape of the thing, not a statement about your specific account.
Sources
- Spotify for Artists: Royalties, official. Confirms the streamshare model and that payouts are calculated from a rights holder's proportion of total platform streams.
- Royalty Exchange and Chartlex, secondary. Used for the commonly cited ~30% platform / ~70% rights holder split, which Spotify does not publish.
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