Streaming Music Revenue | featured news

Pandora pays over 2,000 artists more around $10,000 a year, and over 800 make $50,000. Top-tier artists like Adele are in the $1 million range, while others are tripling that sum. Not bad, in other words, especially since this is only taking into account Pandora payments, not those from Rhapsody, Spotify, or any other online streaming service. In fact, Pandora only accounts for about 6.5% of all online radio.

Figuring out just how lucrative streaming services like Spotify or Apple’s iTunes Match cloud feature, which streams you songs you already own from the cloud, is tough. Mostly, that’s because there is a lack of transparency from both parties. The artists are at times reluctant to share numbers and the streaming services don’t want those deals exposed either.