accideath, 1 year ago

The extra money is probably going into server upkeep, software development, etc., not to artists.

If you want to support artists, Spotify definitely is among the worst choices, while Deezer isn’t great but not horrible either. A little while ago I compiled the most official numbers I could find for any service that I could find. Now mind you, they are a little older (2-ish years) and I cannot remember the source, so take those numbers with a grain of salt but here they go:

Per 1000 streams an Artist gets on average:

• $4.02 on Amazon Music

• $4.37 on Spotify

• $6.76 on both Deezer and YouTube Music

• $7.35 on Apple Music

• $12.50 on Tidal

• $19.00 on Napster

• $38.16 on Quobuz

As I said, the numbers are most likely not the most accurate anymore, the process for these services have changed a little since. However, they might still be interesting enough to know. Maybe someone is bored enough to search the web for more up to date data.

For consumers it might also be interesting to add, that Spotify and YouTube Music, while costing the same as most of the other services (excluding Tidal HiFi Plus and Quobuz), offer a significantly worse audio quality than any other service (aka no lossless audio) and that Tidal‘s expensive HiRes audio tier uses a codec (MQA), that is proven to be terrible and mostly snake oil.

In short: If you want to support artists, stay away from Spotify or amazon. If you want the best audio quality, stay away from Spotify, YouTube Music or Tidal and maybe Deezer (no support for HiRes lossless. Although to be fair, CD-Quality is enough for almost anyone). If you want both and don’t mind paying a little more: use Quobuz