Here’s How Many Spotify Streams It Would Take to Buy A Rolls-Royce

By now, you’ve likely heard musicians gripe about Spotify’s terrible pay rates per stream. At the same time, though, it’s hard to grasp just how bad, especially considering that the people they most impact are already filthy rich in the first place. And so, I thought I’d try to thread the needle of putting it in terms both people like you and I (i.e., the humble proletariat) could understand as well as your not-so-average rock star (i.e., the One Percent).

In short: How many listeners need to listen to a song before it can fully finance a brand new, base model Rolls-Royce Phantom, which, per Edmunds, retails for $475,000?

Not surprisingly, finding out exactly how much Spotify pays per stream is murky business, especially given the variables that can affect per-person payout — mathematical noise that I’m sure Spotify is pleased to hide behind. So I went with the simplest scenario I could think of: A one-person performer who both writes and performs their own songs, who has a 50/50 royalty split with their publisher. In that case, the average payment per stream to the artist seems to be around a quarter of a penny. 

Quick maths thanks to the calculator app can then tell us the stream benchmark that will enable a purchase of a shiny new whip. That number is 190 million plays — a number backed up by a Spotify royalties calculator Billboard developed in service of clarifying expected payouts. It spits out roughly $900,000, which split between artist and publisher allows one Rolls-Royce, at least before taxes.

So what level of success are we hoping for to reach Rolls-Royce money? Well, let’s look at the current top song on the Billboard 100 charts, one that's remained there since the week of July 27th, making it inarguably a smash hit: Virginia native Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” According to Spotify, as of right now, the song has roughly 840 million plays. Thus, your song just has to be about a fourth as popular as a song that was #1 on the charts for a quarter of a year straight.

But again, securing a Rolls-Royce isn’t exactly relatable. You know what is, though? Filling up a tank of gas. A Toyota Camry, for example, holds roughly 15 gallons of fuel, and the current national average gas price is $3.175 a gallon. To stream your way to the $47.63 a full tank demands, it would take 19,052 streams on Spotify.

Even that, though, is hardly music to anyone’s ears.