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Have you ever wondered how much money your favorite music artistes earn as royalties from their numerous streams on digital streaming platforms? Well, I’m here to give you an insight to that question.

Decades ago, music artistes were only able to distribute and sell their songs to their audiences through the use of compact discs (CDs). The songs were burned into these CDs by the music producers and replicated into millions of copies by the distributors/marketers for sale in the markets. It was quite a stressful era for musicians and music distributors back then to be honest. But this modern era of technology has ushered a total revolutionization of how these songs are distributed and marketed to their respective audiences through the creation of digital music streaming platforms such as Spotify, Boomplay, Apple music, Audiomack, Deezer, Soundcloud, Youtube, Tidal, Pandora and others.

Music artistes can now earn more in royalties from the streams of their music on these digital platforms as compared to the times of CD distribution. These digital streaming platforms each have different rates in dollar cents at which they remit to artistes or their chosen music distributors in term of royalties per stream. I’m sure you’re intrigued? I was once baffled on this question myself as to how these music streaming platforms pay these artistes and how much they remit to these artistes or their record labels. Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream on average, Apple music pays between $0.007 and $0.01 per stream, Audiomack pays between $0.003 and $0.004 per stream, Boomplay pays between $0.01 and $0.04 per stream and Deezer pays between $0.005 and $0.007 per stream.

Let me give you a clearer understanding of how much these artistes make using Rema, the Nigerian afrobeats artiste’s Spotify wrapped for 2023 as an example. Rema’s Spotify wrapped data for 2023 showed that the Nigerian artiste racked up a total of 1.5 billion streams on Spotify. Now let’s do the maths! Supposing he was paid $0.003 per stream, multiply $0.003 by 1.5 billion; that would mean the Rema made a whopping $4.5 million in royalties from Spotify. And if he was paid $0.004 per stream, that would mean he made $6 million in royalties from Spotify. Rema is definitely one heck of big boy with a fat bank account!

Wow! What a great time to be a musical artiste! So if you’ve got any dreams of being a professional music artiste, this is the best time to chase your dreams because there is a lot of money in the music industry and it’s all thanks to modern day technology.