How much does your music earn? Pick a streaming service, type your streams, set your royalty percentage and choose where your listeners are — the estimate updates live as you type.
100% if you keep everything. Example: 85% if your distributor keeps 15%.
The same song pays very differently depending on the listener's country — pick a region average or a specific country.
Radio pays for the recording through SoundExchange — not through your distributor. SoundExchange splits every payment like this:
SiriusXM is different: it does not pay a fixed rate per play. By law it pays 15.5% of its revenue to SoundExchange. The per-play figure used in this calculator for SiriusXM is an estimate only, so you can compare it with the other services.
If you are both the master owner and the featured artist, you receive the first two lines (95%). Your percentage in step 3 is already applied to the big payout above.
ESTIMATED AVERAGES, in USD. Spotify does not publish official per-country rates, and no platform pays a fixed amount per stream: real payouts vary by country, subscription type (premium or free), distributor and period. Rates shown are widely reported industry averages (Chartlex 2026) — use them as a guide, not a guarantee.
Besides the recording, every stream also pays for the song itself. The performance royalty is paid by your society (ASCAP, BMI…) in two halves — 50% to the songwriter and 50% to the publisher — and the mechanical royalty is collected by The MLC in the United States or by Songtrust in the rest of the world, and paid to the publisher. Pick yours below — the estimate follows the service and country you chose above.
Your society pays the performance royalty in two halves: 50% to the songwriter and 50% to the publisher.
Your share of the song itself — separate from your recording percentage in step 3. 100% if the song is all yours. Example: 20% if the publishing splits five ways, 20% each — every publishing amount below is multiplied by this percentage.
How the performance royalty splits: your society (BMI, ASCAP…) pays half to the songwriter and half to the publisher — that is why both lines above show 50%. If you are your own publisher, both halves are yours.
Mechanicals go to the publisher: the mechanical royalty is paid to the publisher, and the publisher pays the songwriter whatever their contract says. If the songwriter is their own publisher, they keep all of it.
Songtrust, clearly: Songtrust is not a performance society (PRO) and it is not a publisher. It is an administration company that collects royalties on your behalf and charges a percentage for the service — 15% on performance royalties and 20% on mechanicals, deducted in the table above when you pick Songtrust.
Radio pays no mechanicals: radio only pays for playing the song — the recording through SoundExchange and the composition performance through your society (BMI, ASCAP…). There is no mechanical royalty on radio, so The MLC / Songtrust do not appear here.
ESTIMATED VALUES, in USD. Songwriter royalties are estimated here at roughly 20% of the recording rate for the service and country selected, split between performance and mechanicals, with the songwriter/publisher split shown in the table above; splits between co-writers are not included. Real rates vary by country, service, your society and your publishing deal — and mechanicals depend on where the streams happen: The MLC only covers the United States.
Every stream generates two kinds of royalties. The first is for the recording (the master): the platform pays your distributor, and your distributor pays you. The second is for the composition — the song itself — and it splits into performance royalties, collected by organizations like BMI and ASCAP, and mechanical royalties, collected in the U.S. by The MLC. If a song is not registered in both places, part of its money is simply never collected.
There is no fixed price per stream. Platforms pool the money from subscriptions and advertising, then divide it in proportion to each song's share of total plays. That is why the per-stream value moves from month to month — and why the averages in this calculator are estimates, not promises.
A premium subscriber in Iceland or Norway pays far more per month than a free, ad-supported listener in India or Indonesia — and advertising is worth more in rich markets too. The result: the same song can earn around ten times more per play in Northern Europe or the United States than in lower-income markets. In this calculator, a stream on Spotify averages about $0.0080 in Iceland and about $0.0008 in India.
That does not mean smaller markets do not matter — volume counts, and audiences in Latin America, Africa and Asia are among the fastest growing in the world. It means an artist should know where their listeners are before judging what a million streams is worth.
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