Photo Credit: Sarah Agnew
Welsh indie rock band Los Capesinos!’s public breakdown of Spotify royalties offers a concrete, fan-facing snapshot of how little per-stream payouts are for working indie artists—even with a successful album cycle.
After seeing the 2025 Spotify Wrapped frenzy on social media, the Welsh group decided to release their granular figures tied to their self-released 2024 album All Hell. The band stresses that they’re not asking fans to abandon streaming, but wanted to present accurate data and let their audiences and the industry interpret the data for themselves.
All Hell (2024) is the only album in their catalog to which they retain control of worldwide rights, making it a clean sample of what a fully independent band can collect from digital service providers (DSPs) once distributors and labels are out of the chain. In the breakdown, the band reveals an approximate per-stream figure on twelve months of income from All Hell stands at about 0.34p ($0.043 cents) across all DSPs in aggregate. The band says they make about £1.00 for every 294 streams of a song from the album.
The band’s data also quantified platform-by-platform disparities between DSPs. If every stream of All Hell on Spotify had instead occurred on Tidal, they would have received an extra £31,847.38 ($40,400.00 USD)—effectively doubling their streaming income for the period. Additionally, if those Spotify streams had occurred on Apple Music, the band would have earned an additional £12,331 ($15,600 USD), highlighting the significant gap between Spotify’s effective per-stream rate and that of its competitors.
“Spotify is not doing anything to help any of us, unless you’re in the top 1% of major label artists,” Gareth David, Founder of Los Campesinos! told The Times. The band received a total of £31,940 ($43,118) after their songs were streamed a total of 9.3 million times. Almost 75% of those streams came from Spotify—also earning the lion’s share of the income at £20,428.50 ($27,578 USD).
Apple Music was their second most substantial streaming income, totaling £6,496.50 ($8,770 USD) for nearly 1.4 million streams for a total per-stream payout of 0.47p or ($0.063). Both Spotify and Apple Music run the pro-rata model of royalty payment distribution, but Apple’s royalty pot is not diluted by subscription-free listeners supported by advertising revenue.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.digitalmusicnews.com ’
