Petteri Pyyny
7 Nov 2013 3:18
"How much money you can earn with Spotify?" is the question that has popped up during the past couple of years. Some big name artists have pulled their music from Spotify, blaming extremely bad revenue shares and even labelling Spotify as the main reason for the music industry's decline. However, nobody has come out with the exact figures to back up that claim -- or disprove it. Until now.
Anssi Kela, a Finnish singer-songwriter, released his hit single "Levoton tyttö" earlier this year and he wanted to share his Spotify income details with his fans. He did it by drilling down the figures by month, and differentiating them to revenue coming from Spotify Premium, Spotify Unlimited and Spotify's free version.
First of all, he wanted to note that the revenue he got paid actually includes all the streaming revenue from all the streaming services where his song has been played. However, as other streaming services are virtually non-existent in Finland - with the song being in the Finnish language and with Finland being one of the first countries to actually get Spotify - Spotify stands as the de facto equivalent of music streaming services in the country, so it is fair to say that the figures represent revenue from Spotify, with maybe approximately 1 - 2 percent of the revenue coming from other services.
Here are the monthly figures for this particular song:
March, 2013
186,317 streams
€458.70
April, 2013
415,353 streams
€878.60
May, 2013
300,524 streams
€618.30
June, 2013
156,119 streams
€381.3
Total
1,058,313 streams
€2,336.90
April, 2013
Spotify Free
220,571 streams
€79.90
Spotify Premium and Spotify Unlimited
194,782 streams
€798.60