Artist economics

Estimate your earnings on Audibin

Model follower-based payouts on Audibin against typical per-stream (pro-rata) platform payouts. Adjust platform assumptions and your own artist profile to compare expected monthly or annual outcomes.

Platform assumptions

Expected platform conditions.

Artist profile

Use presets or customize your own numbers.

What's behind these numbers

We don't want you to feel sold to. Here's what the model captures, what it doesn't, and where the inputs come from. If something here looks wrong, tell us — this calculator is a draft we improve in public.

Per-stream rate

We use $0.004 / stream — the midpoint of the widely-cited $0.003–$0.005 industry range for typical pro-rata streaming payouts. Your actual rate varies by platform, listener country, premium-vs-free mix, and label/distributor cut. Independent artists often see less.

The inactive-user baseline

Not every subscriber follows artists right away. Listeners who haven't activated still pay — their pool is spread equally across every artist on the platform. So even at zero followers you'd earn a small baseline. As the platform grows and people activate, that baseline shrinks and your follower-driven income grows.

What's not modeled

Stream-distribution skew (a few mega-listeners), listener geography, collaborative splits across multiple artists on a track, and the payment-processor / platform cut Audibin takes off the top (~7% — not deducted from the figure shown).

The math, in plain English

Each follower routes pool / avg-followed dollars to you — e.g. a $2.50 pool split 12 ways = $0.208/follower. Plus every artist gets an equal slice of inactive listeners' pools as a baseline. Your earnings = followers × $/follow + baseline.

$/follow = pool ÷ avg_followed
baseline = (inactive_users × pool) ÷ total_artists
audibin_monthly = followers × $/follow + baseline
total_pool = paying_users × pool
pro_rata_monthly = streams × $0.0040