Revenue Per Stream For The Artist On iTunes Match And Spotify
So Parks and Gardens would need to see over 3 plays for any song to get them a cent of revenue from a song on iTunes Match. And they already pay distribution service TuneCore $50 a year just to get their music out there on these services. So they need over 15,127 plays of their songs to break even on distributing them alone. The number is better on Spotify, where they’d need to see 5,171 plays.
It is pretty terrible … but what do people expect from a service that costs $25 a year? In that payment, Apple has to both pay its own server bills for a year, make payouts to the respective artists of every song you stream for a year, and make their own profit.
Please explain to me where the inflow comes from to payout larger checks for each stream. If iTunes Match cost more, and artists were still getting paid less than a hundredth of a cent per stream, there would be a much more justified reason to be angry at this situation.