Hi sea, hope youre doing well. I have a question regarding streaming. Is it better to stream on Spotify? I have been using YouTube music for a long time now since I read that it pays better per stream, but i don't know if it is better for the artist to have their songs played on Spotify for radio/charts or whatever else. Whenever theres a tweet regarding the amount of streams I always see they choose Spotify as the platform, and I never see people saying "(song name) has reached over a 1.3 million on YouTube" unless its a music video. Maybe it's a dumb question but if there's any resources you could point out I'd really appreciate it
On any streaming platform, streams from a user that pays for the account will always weigh more than an unpaid (ad-supported) account.
On Spotify, for example, the streams from a paid account count 3x as much for charting purposes as unpaid.
A stream is counted after a listener plays a track for at least 30 seconds. In general,
150 on-demand streams = 1 track sale
1,500 on-demand streams = 1 album unit
(This roughly equates to 10 tracks per album.)
Spotify pays the songwriters near the bottom of all of the DSPs, but it does have the most listeners. That’s probably why UAs report mainly Spotify.
However, streams counting toward charting has different rules for each country. In the USA, tie charting is as above whether on YouTube or Spotify. It’s not quite the same with TikTok.
So continue streaming from YouTube! Apple, Deezer, Tidal streams count too, and pay artists more. Shazam also increases a song’s social media profile, which counts for playlist and radio considerations.
Some tips on streaming in YouTube:
