It used to be easy to figure out your music royalty from streaming services – back when there was only two or three of them and competition was scarce. Now, in 2020+, there’s so many options for streaming that even the Big Dogs of streaming don’t really have an exclusive hold on music maker content distribution. Worse, every one of these creator distribution services has their own royalty. How do you know where to put your marketing efforts to get the most monetary impact and best return on marketing dollars? Without exhaustive research, it’s really just impossible. Lately, we’ve seen an upswing in music royalty calculators, and we wanted to share with you one that seems to be the easiest to use and the most flexible. Read on to find out how to Calculate Your Music Royalty Now!
The Basics:
If you’re a composer or songwriter who uses one of the performance rights organizations (ASCAP, SESAC, BMI) your next quarterly payment is never going to be what you expect it to be. With foreign taxes, payment rates, “surveys” and time-per-paid-unit, sometimes a series of prime-time performances goes without payment. Boo.
But with streaming services like Youtube, Spotify, Apple and Amazon music, that kind of loose tallying has gone. Every stream of music and video is meticulously talleyed and royalties are calculated to the thousandth of a penny. Every performance, no matter how small, is credited to the musicians who make the music.
The issue is knowing which streaming services to focus marketing monies on. If someone has a pre-existing following on Spotify, does it make sense to expand that market to Youtube or Apple music? How much marketing money would it take to get an equal following on one of the other services – and most importantly – would that service pay as well?
There’s several services we’ve surfed which help with this, but few that integrate foreign country payments, multiple streams, and multiple distributors all at once. But we did find one which seems to handle it all with ease. Now, there’s an easy way to calculate your music royalty now. It’s called “Streaming Royalty Calculator” and it’s a free online resource for anyone wishing to find out what they’d be making if their music were streamed on one or more services.
This online service, in its most basic form, allows users to quickly input the streaming service they wish to investigate, how many plays of their music they expect to receive (called “streams”) and quickly calculate the royalty. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the duration of time it took to generate those streams or any fees associated with the distribution of monies to the user’s account (like the Paypal 3% fees), but it does give a quick scan of the main distributors’ rates for streams on music on their services.
There is also an advanced level of the service which allows for over a dozen scenarios to be plotted across a pie chart including country pay out differentiations, additional streaming services and number of streams per instance. Such services as:
- Amazon Premium
- Google Sub
- Groove Sub
- Youtube Red and more
Given that each country of streaming origin comes with its own royalty rate, neglecting to take into account foreign royalties may come with a sharp surprise when the marketing budget fails to create the desired royalties from those areas.
All-in-all Streaming Royalty Calculator is a simple, easy-to-use streaming service royalty calculator which allows music makers to quickly assess the payouts of their streams on the most popular streaming services and give a clear understanding of what kind of royalty money to expect from various streaming counts.
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