If you’re trying to turn streams into rent money, start here: there is no universal per-stream price. Spotify pays music rights-holders from a monthly revenue pool, and your cut depends on how much of all listening you captured that month,your stream share,not on a fixed penny rate.

Spotify divides each region and subscription tier’s revenue among rights-holders in proportion to their share of total streams.

That’s why “$X per stream” numbers you see online vary: the pot changes by country, subscription type, and month. Media often back-calculate rough “effective rates” for context, but they’re estimates, not a rule.

Who actually gets paid

When an eligible track is played, rights-holders get royalties (labels, distributors, and publishers), who then pay the artist according to their contracts.

Independents are usually paid by their distributor; signed artists are paid by their label. Your deal matters as much as your stream count.

A stream is counted when a listener plays at least 30 seconds of a track. Offline plays are added the next time the listener goes online (they must connect periodically to keep downloads active).

New eligibility rules you can’t ignore

Since 2024, a track needs 1,000 streams in the prior 12 months to earn recorded-music royalties. Spotify also moved to curb artificial streaming and low-value “functional noise” uploads.

In practice, very low-played tracks drop out of the payout pool, and those cents are redistributed to the wider pot.

So… how much is a million streams worth?

Because there’s no fixed rate, the answer is it depends on listener location, free vs. Premium, and the month’s total listening.

A common back-of-the-napkin range is roughly $0.003–$0.005 per stream, which puts 1 million streams at about $3,000–$5,000 to rights-holders before any splits with labels, co-writers, or distributors. Treat this as directional guidance, not a promise.