What the Music Industry Doesn’t Talk About Enough: Streaming Royalties and Transparency

For an industry built on the back of creative labor, it’s astonishing how many artists remain in the dark about how they’re paid. Streaming now makes up over 67 percent of recorded music revenues worldwide, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report. And yet, for most artists, monthly payouts from streaming royalties barely cover a night out, let alone a livelihood.

Despite big figures—Spotify paid over $10 billion to rights-holders in 2024, while Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube have each paid over $1 billion annually to the music industry in recent years—most artists earn only a fraction of pennies per stream. Once that money is split between labels, publishers, distributors, and managers, the actual creators are often left with the smallest slice of the pie.

What’s even more alarming is the lack of transparency across these platforms. Spotify publishes a yearly Loud & Clear report, but other major players like Apple Music and YouTube Music offer far less public data. Artists often rely on opaque dashboards from their distributors or labels, with little visibility into how revenue is calculated, where streams occurred, or how royalties are split. In India, multiple artists speaking to Rolling Stone India on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy said that platforms like JioSaavn and the now-defunct Wynk Music’s provide backend data that is inconsistent and mired in delays, while international aggregators sometimes don’t report earnings from local Digital Service Providers (DSPs) at all. Many independent artists say they’re forced to chase their own data across platforms, only to find it incomplete, inconsistent, or misreported.

“There has been some progress toward transparency in the process, which is visible on the artist dashboards we have access to,” Rahul Sinha of UnderTheRadar tells me. “However, a fundamental question remains: are the current systems truly serving independent artists?” He points out that while there is increasing transparency, the challenge lies in the complex web of intermediaries between artists and DSPs. “Will all of them become transparent too? The fact is that there are a lot of people in the pie who create this opaqueness, and that doesn’t help the artist.”

Even within platforms, royalty rates can vary widely. YouTube, which remains the most widely used platform for music consumption globally, pays one of the lowest per-stream rates, estimated between $0.0007 and $0.001, depending on ad revenue and user engagement. Apple Music, on the other hand, has publicly stated it pays about $0.01 per stream on average—nearly double Spotify’s average rate—but that’s still not enough to make a dent unless you’re racking up millions of plays. The real issue is the pro-rata model used by nearly every major streaming platform: instead of your subscription fee being divided among the artists you actually listen to, it goes into a massive pool and is redistributed based on overall market share. That means if you only stream independent artists, your money still ends up rewarding the biggest global stars.

Producer Karan Kanchan, who’s worked with both labels and indie artists, reflects on how little artists are initially told about royalties. “When I started off, there wasn’t much awareness about this stuff. I wouldn’t even be able to fight or ask for it—things like percentages and royalties and everything like that. When working with labels or artists, it would always feel like, okay, I’m getting a bigger opportunity to work with a big rapper or I’m getting a bigger opportunity to work with a big label.”

He says he first began to understand the business side of music—like percentages, master splits, and publishing—through workshops organized by Gully Gang and its co-founder Chaitanya Kataria. “That’s what I learned on the go, and it has been pretty fair,” he says.

Still, even when royalties are accounted for, payment delays are common. Kanchan says, “I think with label songs, even if you have royalties, by the time you actually start getting paid, it’s going to take a long time because there are big-budget music videos, big-budget marketing campaigns that go behind the song. The royalties are first used to recoup those costs, and only then do you get anything out of it. So I think it’s still a long way for me to make money out of royalties.”

Some reforms are underway. Streaming platform Deezer has begun implementing a user-centric payment model in France, while Tidal trialed a similar approach in 2021 with mixed results. These models haven’t scaled globally, largely because they threaten to shift income away from the superstars and major labels who dominate current payouts. In India, once a bright spot for indie curation, platforms like Gaana and JioSaavn now increasingly seem to prioritize film music and catalog hits, reinforcing the same gatekeeping that streaming once promised to dismantle.

Even regulatory efforts haven’t caught up. The U.S. Music Modernization Act and the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which aimed to simplify how songwriters and artists are paid in the streaming era, were steps in the right direction. But disputes like the 2024 Spotify–MLC bundling controversy—where Spotify successfully argued that its Family and Duo plans qualified as “bundles” and paid lower royalties—show that even in mature markets, the definition of fair royalty calculation is still up for debate. In regions like South Asia, where collecting societies (royalty tracking and distribution bodies) are under-resourced or riddled with governance issues, musicians often have no idea what they’re owed—or whether their songs are being monetized at all.

In India, however, the situation has improved through the work of the Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS)—the only registered copyright society representing lyricists, composers, and publishers. Since rebooting under new leadership in 2017, IPRS has become one of the world’s fastest-growing collection agencies. According to data from their annual reports, revenues rose from ₹46 crore in FY 2017–18 to ₹314 crore by FY 2021–22, and ₹564 crore in FY 2022–23. That year, over ₹300 crore was distributed to more than 7,500 members. IPRS has also launched digital dashboards to give members real-time access to usage and royalty data and has invested in AI-driven metadata systems to identify unclaimed royalties. Public campaigns like “Credit the Creators” and “My Music, My Rights” are helping more artists understand how to protect and collect their earnings. It’s not without flaws, but it does show what’s possible when infrastructure, transparency, and education align.

Alongside collecting societies, new players in the Indian music business are also stepping in to provide better financial tools for artists. MGMH Groove, a growing distribution and artist services company, recently partnered with Snafu to offer royalty advances to artists and labels. This move, reported by Musicplus.in, is part of MGMH’s shift toward expanded services that go beyond just distribution, now including marketing support, data analytics, and upfront financial backing for creators. For artists still navigating delayed royalty cycles or irregular payouts, such options offer short-term liquidity and increased control.

Meanwhile, the rise of streaming fraud adds another layer of chaos. In 2024, a Danish criminal reportedly earned over $290,000 through fraudulent streams before being caught. Meanwhile, honest artists struggle to get playlisted or promoted unless they’re backed by major labels or pay for visibility through platform-specific “promotion tools,” which often trade discoverability for reduced payouts.

Sinha notes the broader systemic imbalance: “It’s clear that independent artists are excluded from the conversation. They are at the mercy of the commercial interests of these platforms. We live in a digital world, so in that sense, yes, streaming royalties are important. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that somewhere it is taking away an artist’s ability to economically compete in this field.”

For independent artists, self-releasing may offer better control. “If you’re releasing your music independently, it’s much easier to take care of all these royalties and amounts,” Kanchan says. “Now even distributors like Madverse or TuneCore help artists split their royalties online. At the point of collection itself, it splits to the artists according to their contributions, which is a really good thing for managing royalties with collaborators.”

He adds, “It’s going to be more important to get people educated about it because when I started off, I had zero clue, and I didn’t know how much money I was leaving on the table. Having these matters in the contract while you’re signing for songs—like bi-monthly or once-a-year reports of the royalties—is something that you can fight for in the contracts.”

This isn’t just about low per-stream revenue—it’s about an ecosystem designed to benefit platforms, labels, and catalog owners, while sidelining the artists who power it. Musicians deserve access to clean, auditable data: where their streams are coming from, what their exact payout rate is, and how intermediary parties are cutting into it. Without that, streaming remains a game of scale, not sustainability.

Platforms will argue that they’re doing more than ever—Spotify says over 10,000 artists earned $100,000 or more in 2024, and Apple has increased its payouts in line with subscriber growth. But these headlines only reflect a small elite. For the vast majority of artists, streaming isn’t a career model—it’s marketing. And until the economics and data structures shift to prioritize creators, not just shareholders, the industry will continue to thrive off the very people it undervalues most.