Streaming revenue calculator
The problem
Streaming revenue is not a livable income for most independent music creators unless they cross a threshold number of streams most will never reach. Even a project that hits 1 million streams on Spotify earns roughly $3,500, and that's not a monthly figure: it's a one-time payout, distributed quarterly.
To make up the gap, independent artists are pushed toward merch, live shows, and physical copies of their own work, most of which require real out-of-pocket cost to produce, with limited accessibility to the resources needed to do it well.
And streaming is only one piece of what an artist is actually owed. Total music royalties break into separate categories (performance, mechanical, sync, songwriting, and print), each collected and paid out through a different platform: songwriting royalties through ASCAP, mechanical through the MLC, streaming through a distributor like DistroKid. Knowing where to look, and how to actually claim what's owed, is its own burden layered on top of making the work.
I built the Streaming Revenue Calculator to make this math visible: enter a stream or donation count, see what it actually projects to across platforms, and see it next to what a sustainable income would require.
Key flows
Projecting income from streams
Enter a stream or donation count for a release and see projected payout across platforms, translated into what that actually means as income, not just a headline number.
Comparing platforms
Surfaces how payout per stream and payout cadence (one-time vs. recurring, monthly vs. quarterly) differ across platforms, so the same stream count can look very different depending on where it happened.
Try it
Contribution calculator
A simplified version of the real tool: pick a platform and see what streams actually pay.
Choose a platform
Approx. rate: $0.0035 per stream (very rough estimate).
Total revenue (approx)
$35.00
Why this project
I work day-to-day as a product designer, and this problem space is one I keep coming back to: why are so many of our most talented and loved independent artists struggling to find sustainable income? Why is the royalties system so confusing and split across so many disconnected platforms?
This calculator is a first, small step at making the economics legible. It's not news that streaming underpays independent creators, but seeing the actual numbers next to each other, instead of hearing them anecdotally, changes how concrete the problem feels.
I see this as a much larger space than one calculator: royalty tracking across fragmented platforms, tooling for the out-of-pocket cost of merch and physical releases, and clearer paths for artists to understand what they're actually owed and from where. I'm actively looking for more tools worth building here. If you work in music or artist services and have ideas, I'd like to hear them.