It's no secret that streaming services are sparing in their compensation of the artists that make the music hosted on their platforms. Spotify in particular has a reputation for dispensing pitifully meagre royalties, with estimates coming in at an average of $0.003 to $0.005 paid out per stream.
If you ask us, that's reason enough to avoid using the platform, and that's before we've even mentioned Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's $100m investment in AI defence technology company Helsing. But if we want to support musicians (and avoid financing AI-powered military drones) while still enjoying the convenience of streaming, which service should we choose as an alternative?
That's just one of the questions answered in musician and content creator Benn Jordan's latest video, a smorgasbord of "music industry data-porn" that addresses a trio of issues facing independent musicians in 2025.
After looking into the growing prevalence of AI-generated music on streaming services - and how to detect it - Jordan takes on the so-called "Splice problem", a term that refers to the tendency of artists using loops and samples from platforms such as Splice to be unfairly hit with copyright strikes on YouTube, because they've used the same royalty-free material in their songs as other artists.
In the final chapter of his multi-faceted data-dump, Jordan provides a detailed ranking of the royalties he receives from various streaming services and music platforms as an independent artist that owns 100% of the rights to his music, giving us a fascinating insight into the varying pay-per-stream rates offered by platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL and Deezer.
Jordan, who records under the alias The Flashbulb, reveals that social media sites are by far the least generous in their compensation; by his calculations, Russian social media platform VK pays out a stunningly tight-fisted $0.00005 per stream, while Snapchat and Meta trail closely behind.
When it comes to dedicated music streaming services, though, YouTube Music and Pandora are tied at the bottom of the list, offering up a paltry $0.0027 per stream. Spotify isn't doing much better: as the third-most miserly platform, it paid Jordan $0.0029 per stream - even less than many estimates we've seen in the past. (That's not much of a surprise, though.)
In the middle of the rankings we have Apple Music ($0.0061), Deezer ($0.007) and TIDAL ($0.0078), all of which pay out more than double the amount Spotify does per stream. Astonishingly, Amazon Music tops these three by a wide margin, coming in at $0.0096 per stream - more than three times Spotify's rate. That makes Amazon Music the most generous of the mainstream streaming services included on Jordan's list, only to be bested by two other platforms.
These are Qobuz, a French streaming service that offers high-quality lossless audio, and... Peloton. Yes, you read that right: Peloton, the manufacturer of those posh-looking exercise bikes you may have seen in expensive gyms, runs the streaming platform paying musicians the highest per-stream royalty rate in 2025.
As Jordan notes, Peloton doesn't only make stationary bicycles. They also run a music streaming service that can be accessed via the bike's display while cycling, featuring a curated catalogue of tracks to soundtrack the rider's workout - and, by Jordan's calculations, paying the artists behind that music $0.03 per stream, more than 10 times Spotify's rate.
Admittedly, even the cyclists amongst us won't be doing the majority of our music listening via Peloton's bike-tethered streaming platform, so if you're looking to join an ethical streaming service that compensates artists fairly - and can be used without putting on your gym shorts - it appears that Qobuz is your best bet, paying more than four times Spotify's royalty rates at $0.0136 per stream.
