Yesterday, Apple revealed that it would pay their artists during its free three-month trial after an open letter from Taylor Swift got them to understand the significance. That’s all fine and dandy, but today, we’ve found out Apple’s true monetary value — which is paying artists $0.002 per play, according to Digital Music News. This amount is less than one-forth of what Spotify pays out – which pays artists anywhere from .006 to .0084 dollars per play.
So, if an artist’s music is streamed on Apple Music, it will take roughly four times as many plays to make the same $100 they would make on Spotify if said artist was getting paid $0.008 per stream. And thats after the record label takes out its cut.
If you do the math, an artist would need almost 400,000 plays during the three-month trial period to make $100 — granted, that’s if you take the average $0.011 per play that a label takes from each play.
Once the three-month trial ends, Apple Music will reported share 71.5 percent of its revenue with artists, according to Business Insider (which is 1.5% higher than Spotify). But who knows at this point? Only time will tell.
