Streaming now brings in about seven dollars of every ten that the recorded music business earns. The global industry’s annual report, published in March 2026, put total revenue for 2025 at $31.7 billion. Streaming alone passed $22 billion, and paid subscriptions topped 830 million. The totals are huge. What reaches an individual artist for a single play is tiny.
Most of us stream without a second thought. A playlist runs in one app, a video in another, Pragmatic88 sits in a browser tab, and the phone just keeps going. Behind the playlist there is a payment system that few listeners ever look at, and it works differently from what people expect.
There is no fixed price per play
No big service pays a set amount for each play. Spotify, Apple Music and the rest collect subscription and ad money, keep their share, and drop the remainder into a pool. The pool is then divided by each rights holder’s slice of all plays in that period. So a single play is worth whatever the month’s pool works out to.
The averages are small. Worldwide, one Spotify play brings in about 0.4 of a cent, which means roughly 250 plays to earn one dollar. Apple Music tends to pay more, somewhere between 0.6 and 1 cent. Free-tier listeners bring in less than paying subscribers, and the listener’s country matters a lot.
The top is crowded, the middle is thin
Spotify’s own transparency report, also out in March, shows how uneven the picture is. The platform paid out more than $11 billion in 2025, about 10% more than a year earlier. Around 13,800 artists made at least $100,000 from it, and about 1,500 crossed the million mark. Eighty artists earned more than $10 million, against a single one in 2015.
Now look at the other end. Line up all artists by earnings, and the one at position 100,000 made roughly $7,300 last year. In 2015 that same position paid about $350. That is twenty times more, and still a modest sum for a year of work.
Who gets paid first
The platform pays rights holders, not the singer directly. Money goes to a label or a distributor, and the artist gets whatever the contract leaves. The industry body puts the artist share of recorded music revenue at a bit over a third, 35.5% in 2025. There are also two layers of royalties, one for the recording and one for the song itself. A singer who writes her own material can collect both.
Ukraine: hits, costs and a moving rate card
FIЇNKA, the singer from Ivano-Frankivsk, is a fresh example. Her song “Afyny” has passed 24 million views on YouTube, and she wrote the words and the music herself. She told an interview show that streaming brought her real money, that not all of it had been paid out yet, and that she cared more about the concerts the song filled.
Forbes Ukraine ran the numbers on several other 2025 hits. The figures are estimates built on the end-of-2024 label rates:
- Parfeniuk’s “Vrubay”: the team spent over €16,000 on recording, promotion and the video. From November 2024 to July 2025 the track collected 136 million plays and roughly €98,700, which works out to about 73 euro cents per thousand plays
- Drevo’s “Smaragdove Nebo”, released in late May 2025: 60 million plays on YouTube and YouTube Music brought an estimated €60,000–90,000, and 6.5 million Spotify plays up to €5,200
- Alena Omargalieva’s “Tvoya”: around €18,900 from music platforms, plus more than €19,000 from 25.7 million clip views on YouTube
A viral TikTok dance helped “Vrubay” a great deal. More than 191,000 videos were shot to the track. It is also worth remembering that nobody sees these sums in full. A distributor and a label take their share first, then taxes.
What changed since 2024
In 2024 Ukrainian label heads quoted payouts for a million plays on each service. Fresh royalty benchmarks from the analytics firm Dynamoi, based on statements through late 2025 and early 2026, give a picture per thousand plays in Ukraine. The sources use different methods and currencies, so read it as a direction, not an exact trend:
- Spotify: €0.6–0.8 in 2024, about $1.3–1.4 now
- YouTube Music: €1–1.5 in 2024, about $2.4 now
- Apple Music: €2–3 in 2024, about $3.1 now
Spotify moved most. Even so, $1.3–1.4 per thousand is about a third of the world average. A Ukrainian analysis in 2026 found that an artist here needs nearly four times as many Apple Music plays as a British one to earn the same €1,000.
The labels also changed. In 2024 the head of ENKO said streaming made up less than half of the label’s earnings. By 2025 the business press described streaming as its main source of profit, while in 2020 it was not even among the top three.
Where the rest of the money comes from
For established names concerts still come first, and ads and sponsorship next. Besides that, Ukrainian labels point to a handful of other sources:
- Sync licences, when a song lands in a film, a series, a TV show or an advert
- Public performance royalties when the track plays on radio or in cafes and restaurants
- Merchandise sold at shows and online
- Joint ad campaigns with other artists
- Crowdfunding from fans
So read a view count as reach, not income. It says how many people heard the track, not how much the author earned. If you like a singer, buy a ticket to her show.
