My Band Has 1,000,000 Spotify Streams. Want to See Our Royalties?

This is the largest spreadsheet of Spotify royalties we’ve received to date.

That group that shared these statements was unsigned until just a few months ago. Now, the group is fast-rising within a specific EDM niche. While still label-less, they somehow managed to get onto a few Spotify featured playlists. That’s becoming increasingly difficult for smaller artists. Though lightning can strike if the right, influential playlist curator stumbles upon your music.

We’ve seen this happen before, particularly to singer/songwriter Perrin Lamb, who scored more than $40,000 after getting slotted onto some heavily-streamed coffeehouse playlists (which powered more than 10 million streams). We asked this group how they got slotted onto their plum playlists, and they told us they’re not sure exactly how it happened. They weren’t working a strategy, they didn’t have a label at the time, and they definitely didn’t have money to blow on ‘playlist payola’ (and if you think you don’t need that, read this).

That said, it looks like this group has been getting a good amount of critical acclaim and buzz within their electronica niche, especially from their home turf of Australia. So, it’s not entirely an accident that Spotify picked up on that momentum.

Looks like things are going well for these guys. The group just signed an independent record deal and keep getting attention (and you’ve probably heard of this label).

And with that, here are this group’s Spotify royalties. We’re missing that last few months, based reporting lag (and maybe their recent signing), but we’ve straight line estimated those based on the previous data (which goes back to October of 2013).

Total number of streams: 1,023,501

Total revenue: $4,955.90

Specific time period accounted: 10/15/2013 – 2/15/2013

(March, April, May periods not yet reported; estimated)

Average per-stream payout: $0.004891

And, for those who want to take the plunge, here’s the entire royalty breakdown. If enough people want to play with the data itself, we’ll put a shared spreadsheet up on Gdrive or something (just let us know in comments).

And please share your royalties to [email protected]! It will greatly help other artists and the industry to get a better sense of what streaming platforms are paying.

Written while listening to ‘2 Phones’ by Kevin Gates.