You Need To Get 2,521,621,250,000 Streams On Spotify To Buy An Iron Man Suit. That is according to this Spotify Song Streaming Calculator.
It’s not a secret that musicians are paid very little on popular streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and even Apple Music. The pay is so little there are even rumblings of a potential “Musician’s Union,” as reported by Rolling Stone.
Even though streaming is the most popular avenue for fans to listen to their favorite artist, the likes of Ariana Grande and Beyoncé make the majority of their revenue from live performances. In fact, Ariana Grande was reportedly paid $8 million to headline this year’s Coachella, which doubled Bey’s paycheck from 2018 according to Insider.
Based on the Song Streaming Calculator, an artist needs at least 80,275,000 song streams to buy a house in the United States. For context, Vampire Weekend only has one song that has been streamed more than that amount, and that song is “A-Punk,” which has been streamed over 172 million times on Spotify. With 6.3 million monthly listeners on the streaming platform, Vampire Weekend’s fans have to stream at least 12 songs each within a month for the band to earn enough revenue to purchase a house.
Vampire Weekend is a fairly popular band with a new album release boosting its streams but for the thousands of other artists on Spotify, it is nearly impossible to make a living if all their earnings are only from Spotify.