New artist on Spotify? Prepare for ruin if they hear you from Spain

April 17, 2022

The world’s leading music streaming platform has always been the subject of critics by the artists for the fees they receive for each reproduction. Next, we are going to explain from the inside how everything works on Spotify and what it means for a new Spanish artist to position himself within the service paying for advertising to have a minimum visibility.

Nothing better than a hobby to edit a couple of albums without any professional aspiration and live from within how the industry works The world of music has gone from being a culture business yet marketing business that today the big record companies and the media continue to move. Artists like Bad Bunny (48 million monthly listeners), Maluma (33 million), Rosalía (26 million) are the leaders of the platform. There are also other phenomena that have burst onto the scene with force, such as the case of Paulo Londra who, at just 24 years old, has already exceeded 20 million monthly listeners. All these stars bring together all the royalties paid by the streaming company each year, about 2,000 million dollars. How much does each reproduction cost? The first issue to take into account is geolocation and that is where Spain comes out badly compared to other countries.

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What Spotify pays for each stream

If you search the Internet you will find a lot of information on the subject, but in the following report we will explain what a musician who has just started and wants to have a minimum presence on the platform can receive. According to different publications, artists receive on average about 0.003 – 0.004 euros for each reproduction assuming that a consecrated singer will be heard throughout the planet. If we focus only on Spain, the figures change and the average falls to $0.00046 on averageyou are reading correctly, three zeros.

In the image above appears the control panel of my disk «start just because«, launched last June and has accumulated more than 128,000 views and has generated only 60 dollars. 95% of the streams have been in Spain and that is why the price paid by Spotify is much lower than the averages that international artists can receive. In addition, if you want to withdraw the benefits, you will have to pay another 2% additional commission which in this case will take Paypal. Below, you can see what each song has generated based on the reproductions.

Release of an album and presence on the platform

When an artist starts from scratch and does not have a record label to support him and position him on the different platforms, he must turn to music distribution companies that take care of everything. The best known are the following; LANDR, CD Baby, Avid Play, TuneCore, Ditto Music or MondoTunes. They basically charge between 30 and 50 dollars a year on average and they are responsible for distributing on all platforms (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Tidal, etc). We do not know if they receive any type of commission for each stream, but the truth is that they are the only way to appear on the main streaming services and group the benefits in a single account.

Spotify visibility

Uploading an album to the main streaming platform is free but the visibility is nil and that is a real problem for artists who start from scratch. Precisely TikTok realized this problem that also happens in the rest of social networks and the new «TikTokers» are rewarded with visibility if they offer good content and we can see accounts with few followers but tens of thousands of reproductions. In the case of Spotify, it’s time to go through the checkout if you want users to know your music and get ready because the prices are not reasonable at all.

As can be seen in the image, a campaign of €2500 with an announcement in audio format that invites you to enjoy the new album offers very mediocre results and the price of each click is more than 1 euro. A record company has the capacity to carry out a great campaign on Spotify to give visibility to an artist, it is impossible for someone who starts from scratch to sustain these costs, especially since the results are very, very discreet.

Cheaper options to have visibility on Spotify

There are companies that are dedicated to marketing within the platform and what they offer is the possibility that profiles with many followers and with song lists include you in their lists for a fee. soundcampaign It is one of the alternatives used to have visibility, but the problem is that most of the “musical analysts” are English-speaking and a Spanish artist can contribute little or nothing. The good news is that the company returns the money if it is not able to include you in lists.

With this scenario, it is very difficult for a musician to make a living from his songs using digital platforms. Curiously, the physical format is much more profitable since the approximate cost of publishing a CD with a cover is less than 2 euros. By selling only 10 discs at a price of 10 euros You already make more money than getting 128,000 plays on Spotify. It is clear that music has become a marketing business dominated by a large platform that does not hesitate to pay €60 million annual to FC Barcelona for renaming his stadium and sponsoring his jersey, but he has the small musicians completely unattended.