Answers/Verified numbers & open data

What does each organisation actually charge?

Every figure below was read off the organisation's own website on the date in the last column. Fees move. If you are reading this months later, treat the date as the honest expiry on the number and check the source link before you pay anything.

What did each platform actually pay per play?

This table is derived from my complete DistroKid bank-details export covering June 2019 to July 2026 — 45,894 royalty lines, 49 stores, 184 countries and 41,976,668 measured plays across the stores shown here. It is recording-side money only: what a distributor paid for the use of the master. Performance royalties from ASCAP or BMI, mechanical royalties from The MLC and SoundExchange income are three separate pots and appear nowhere in this data.

Rates are normalised for team percentage, so tracks with splits do not understate the platform's rate. Play types are kept separate rather than averaged together, because a paid download and an ad-supported video view are not the same unit. Stores with fewer than 500 measured plays are suppressed as too small to mean anything.

What does this data not show?

Four things, and they all matter. It does not show gross platform payouts — these are net amounts that reached my account. It does not show composition-side income, because a distributor never collects it. It is not representative of every artist, because per-play rates are a pro-rata share of a revenue pool and mine reflects my own listener mix and country spread. And it is historical: it covers June 2019 to July 2026 and says nothing about what any platform will pay next year.

I publish my own numbers because the alternative is everybody arguing about somebody's guess. Pull your own export and add it up — it is the single most clarifying afternoon available to an independent artist.