How Much Do Artists Make Per Stream? Spotify’s Filings Put €3.20 a Month Behind Each Subscriber and €0.26 Behind Each Free Listener

Spotify’s cost of revenue in the quarter ended 30 September 2026 worked out to €3.20 per Premium subscriber per month and €0.26 per ad-supported listener per month, a gap of 12.22 times, measured from the segment note of the company’s own quarterly report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That is the most direct public answer there is to how much do artists make per stream: not a rate, but two pools of very different size, and which pool a play falls into is settled by the listener’s billing status rather than by anything the artist did. Across the six audited quarters from the first quarter of 2025 to the third quarter of 2026, that gap has never been narrower than 10.81 times.

Segment cost of revenue divided by period-end users in that tier, divided by three. Cost of revenue is an upper bound on royalties, not a royalty figure.

Show the numbers

Tier	EUR per listener per month
Premium subscribers	3.20
All monthly active users	1.41
Ad-supported listeners	0.26

Source: Spotify Technology S.A., Form 6-K for the quarter ended 30 September 2026, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, retrieved 4 Nov 2026 · download the data

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The two sides of that ratio are not the same size. Spotify reported 499 million ad-supported monthly active users against 306 million Premium subscribers, out of 788 million monthly active users in total. The ad-supported side is 63.3 per cent of the listeners and 11.8 per cent of the cost of revenue. It is 9.7 per cent of the revenue. Blended across everyone who opened the app, cost of revenue came to €1.41 per listener per month, nearer the subscriber figure than the listener split would suggest, because almost all the money is on one side.

The two tier shares add to more than 100 per cent because Spotify counts subscribers and ad-supported listeners separately and the same person can appear in both inside one quarter. The total row is Spotify’s own consolidated figure, not the sum of the segments.

Why how much do artists make per stream has no single answer#

The reason the gap exists is written into the filing, not inferred from it. Spotify describes subscription music royalties as based on “the greater of a percentage of relevant revenue and a per user amount”, and ad-supported music royalties as “typically a percentage of relevant revenue”. One side has a floor underneath it that is counted per head. The other side mostly does not. When advertising revenue per free listener is low, there is no contractual minimum catching the payout on the way down, so the per-stream value of free listening is whatever the advertising market happened to clear that month, divided by however much free listening happened.

That is why the company’s position that no per-stream rate exists is technically correct and practically useless. A rate set by dividing a variable pool by a variable denominator is still a number an artist gets paid, and still measurable after the fact. This desk has measured it from the other end, finding that no platform’s measured rate rose across the years it could be tracked, and pricing what Spotify’s global pool pays per thousand streams before the chain takes its cut. What the segment note adds is the shape underneath that average: the blended rate everybody quotes is a mixture of a floor-protected pool and an unprotected one.

The series does not wobble, and it has not reverted. The ratio was 11.34 in the first quarter of 2025 and fell to 10.81 in the second. Every quarter of 2026 then sits above every quarter of 2025: 13.30, then 12.86, then 12.22. Inside 2026 the gap has narrowed each quarter, but it has not come back to the 2025 range. The driver is visible in the components: cost of revenue per Premium subscriber moved from €3.13 to €3.20 across the panel, dipping to €3.03 in between, while cost of revenue per ad-supported listener fell from €0.28 to €0.26 even as the ad-supported audience grew from 423 million to 499 million.

Which tier Africa sits in, and why nobody can measure it#

Spotify does not publish a paid-versus-free split for any individual market, so the honest position is that this desk cannot measure where African listeners sit in the ratio above. What is measurable is the price against the income. Spotify’s reported Premium ARPU for the quarter was €4.95 a month, which annualises to €59.40, or $66.93 at the European Central Bank euro reference rate of 1.1267 on 4 November 2026. Set against World Bank GNI per capita across the 25 African markets this desk tracks, which is fewer than half the continent and leaves the smallest and least documented economies out of the picture entirely, that one-year figure is 0.5 per cent of income in Mauritius, 1.1 per cent in South Africa, 1.5 per cent in Morocco, 2.1 per cent in Egypt, 4.9 per cent in Nigeria and 11.7 per cent in Mozambique.

ARPU is a global blended figure and Spotify prices below it in most African markets, so those shares overstate what a local subscription actually costs. The ranking is the point rather than the level, and it does not line up the way the obvious version of this story would want it to. Three of the four African markets Spotify publishes a daily chart for sit in the most affordable third of the 25: South Africa at 1.1 per cent, Morocco at 1.5 per cent and Egypt at 2.1 per cent. Nigeria, which supplies the largest bloc of artists on this desk’s chart panel, is mid-table at 4.9 per cent. Every market on this list where the subscription tier looks genuinely out of reach, Mozambique at 11.7 per cent among them, is a market Spotify publishes no chart for, so the tier split cannot be observed there through the panel this desk uses, even in principle. Other services do chart several of them. What can be said is narrower and still worth saying: the easiest tier to reach anywhere on this list is the one carrying 11.8 per cent of the money.

The counter-reading#

Four things could break this finding, and one of them is serious.

The serious one is the denominator. An ad-supported monthly active user is, by Spotify’s own definition, anyone who consumed content for more than zero milliseconds in the previous thirty days. A Premium subscriber is a billing relationship. These are not comparable units of listening, and if free listeners stream far less per head than subscribers do, the per-listener gap of 12.22 times overstates the per-stream gap by whatever that engagement difference is. Spotify publishes no stream counts by tier, so the correction cannot be applied. The per-listener gap is measured; the per-stream gap is bounded by it and not equal to it.

What can be stated is the break-even. For the per-stream rate to come out equal across the two tiers, a free listener would have to do 8.2 per cent of a subscriber’s listening per head and no more. Move both judgement calls in the measurement by 20 per cent against the finding at the same time, cutting the Premium side for the audiobook and podcast content it carries and inflating the ad-supported side for its soft denominator, and the ratio falls to 8.15, which still requires free listening to run at 12.3 per cent of paid listening per head before the two tiers pay the same per stream.

The second cuts against the finding too. Cost of revenue is not royalties. Spotify states it consists predominantly of royalty and distribution costs but also carries payment processing, hosting and non-music content, and the filing puts audiobook costs and subscriber video podcast costs inside the Premium segment. The Premium figure is therefore inflated by content that pays no music rights holder anything, so the true music-royalty gap is narrower than 12.22 times by an amount the filing does not let anyone calculate.

The third is the user count. Period-end subscriber and listener counts are used here because Spotify does not publish average daily users by segment, and period-end counts are higher than period averages in a growing base, which understates both per-listener figures. Both tiers grew across the panel, so the effect largely cancels in the ratio.

The fourth would be a single quarter carrying the result, and it does not. Dropping the highest of the six quarters moves the mean ratio by 2.22 per cent. Dropping the top three moves it by 6.88 per cent. Dropping five of six leaves a single quarter at 10.81 times, 9.69 per cent below the full-panel mean of 11.97. There is no quarter whose removal puts the finding in doubt.

What this is worth to an artist and an independent label#

Run a listener-year down the chain and the numbers get small enough to plan against. At €0.26 a month, one ad-supported listener generates €3.12 a year of Spotify cost of revenue, the gross ceiling for everyone in the chain combined. One subscriber generates €38.40. Pushed through the four documented outcomes of one Nigerian label and distribution chain this desk has already traced, where the artist’s share ran from 5.1 per cent to 25 per cent, a free listener returns between €0.16 and €0.78 a year to the artist and a subscriber returns between €1.96 and €9.60.

That cascade was measured on Nigerian telco and app platforms, not on Spotify, so the four shares describe a different set of contracts. The table shows how thin the free-tier number becomes once a chain takes its cuts; it is not a measurement of Spotify payouts in Nigeria. Treat it as an order of magnitude and nothing finer.

Two things follow. The first is a spending ceiling: if acquiring one more free listener costs over €0.26 a month in marketing, it is not recovered from Spotify, and the artist’s own share of it is between €0.16 and €0.78 a year. Audience figures quoted from free-tier-heavy markets belong in a revenue forecast discounted by an order of magnitude, not by a few per cent.

The second is where the leverage sits. The rate is not negotiable by any artist, and the floor protecting the subscription pool is set between Spotify and the major rights holders, not with a label in Lagos or Johannesburg. The share of the chain is negotiable, and on documented Nigerian terms it ranges from 5.1 per cent to 25 per cent while four of eight self-serve Nigerian distributors state no revenue-share rate anywhere. On a €3.12 free-listener year, the distance between the worst and best documented share is worth more than anything a platform is likely to change about its rate.