200th post - some hiliarious track distribution revenue stats :
Youtube - 11.4M streams - $8.6K
Youtube 'RED' - 2.2M streams - $12.2K
Spotify - 437K streams - $1.1K
Apple Music - 22K streams - $139
Tiktok - 216M streams - $75 (yes,you read that right!!)
(This is not including my main Youtube channel)
TikTok didn't pay artists per video view at all. It paid a flat micro-sync fee (typically
$0.015 to $0.03)
per new video created using the sound, regardless of how many views those videos got. If 2,500 people made videos with the track and two of those clips went mega-viral for 216 million views, the artist got paid ~$75 for the 2,500 creations while the analytics dashboard flexed 216M "streams." (Even after TikTok shifted toward qualified view-based royalties in late 2024, payouts hover around $7 to $13 per million qualified streams , still up to 50x lower than Spotify.)
Google rebranded YouTube Red to
YouTube Premium / YouTube Music back in 2018, so seeing YouTube RED is a classic tell of a legacy distributor royalty schema (like DistroKid's older accounting labels). Because every single play in that bucket comes from a paying subscriber rather than an ad-supported viewer,
2.2M Premium streams paid 42% more ($12.2K) than 11.4M regular YouTube views ($8.6K). One YouTube Red play in this batch was worth
15,971 TikTok plays.
Apple Music beats every other platform on a per-stream basis paying
2.5x more per play than Spotify ($0.00252). Spotify's blended average gets dragged down by its ad-supported free tier and lower-ARPU regional pricing, whereas Apple Music is 100% paid subscriptions.