How Much Do Artists Make Per Lyric?
Apparently, it only took Ed Sheeran an hour and a half to write his smash hit ‘Shape of You’. But with 2.4 billion streams worldwide, the track has already earned over £8.6 million. Even more astonishingly, this equates to approximately £12,881 per word!
But how do some of the other bestselling artists in the world compare?
According to recent reports, Spotify currently pays artists approximately $0.004327 / £0.00349 per play. So, we looked at the top 100 most streamed songs on Spotify and used this figure to calculate how much each song has earned. We then broke this down by the number of lyrics each song has, to see who’s earning the most per word.
We also looked at 50 of the most popular artists on Spotify, based on average monthly streams, total followers and recent award wins. Using their top 10 most popular tracks on Spotify, we were then able to work out what their average cost per lyric is.
Explore the data in full below and see how much your favourite artist earns.
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Spotify’s $0.00437 per stream quoted in multiple sources, including Digital Music News, Visual Capitalist and Spotify Community forum. Currency conversion accurate as of 30/04/2020, based on a rate of 1 USD : 0.800234 GBP. Spotify streaming data and most popular songs accurate as of 24/04/2020.
