A low total is usually the sum of many small rows, each set by the listener’s country, the type of listening and when the store reported it, not a distributor skimming. But nobody can tell from the outside which of those hit your money. Only the rows of your own statement show that, and a few specific patterns in them (units but no pay, a month with no Spotify rows at all) are worth a support ticket.
Take an example: $41 for 18,000 Spotify streams. Divide: $41 ÷ 18,000 is about $0.0023 a stream, or about $2.28 per 1,000. That is arithmetic on those two numbers, not a published rate, and it assumes the $41 is Spotify alone and covers exactly those 18,000 streams. If your $41 also includes other stores, or the 18,000 includes months not yet paid, the real per-stream figure is different. Check which of those is true before drawing a conclusion.
For comparison, two published estimates put Spotify at $0.003–$0.005 a stream. At that range, 18,000 streams would come to roughly $54 to $90 (multiplying out the published range; again, arithmetic, not a promise). So $0.0023 sits below both published ranges. That is a reason to look closer. It is not proof that anything is wrong.
| Store | RouteNote (updated May 22, 2025) | Royalty Exchange (published July 15, 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Spotify | $0.003–$0.005 | $0.003–$0.005 |
| Apple Music | $0.01 | $0.007–$0.01 |
| Amazon Music | $0.004 | ~$0.004 |
| Tidal | $0.013 | $0.013–$0.015 |
| Deezer | $0.0064 | $0.005–$0.007 |
| YouTube Music | $0.008 | $0.001–$0.002 |
The two sources disagree most on YouTube Music: $0.008 against $0.001–$0.002. RouteNote also lists YouTube’s own figure as $0.005–$0.007. Both say there is no fixed rate, and that it moves with the listener’s country, paid versus ad-supported listening, and the size of the pool. Royalty Exchange says premium streams pay roughly 2.5 to 3 times what ad-supported ones do. RouteNote attributes its numbers to “various sources” it does not name; Royalty Exchange says its numbers draw on TuneCore and Ditto data. Treat both as rough guides, not as what you are owed.
If you find one of those, write to support with the specific rows (store, country, month, units). A ticket that names rows gets a different reply than “my money is low”. Whether a distributor takes a cut: DistroKid describes its model as a fee for the service rather than a percentage of what stores send, according to a summary of its help centre. We could not open that page when writing this, so read its current pricing page for yourself.
Spotify’s own community has threads from people asking the same thing, for instance “Do my distributor ‘Distrokid’ pay me correctly ???”.
Open your own DistroKid statement here and see exactly which store and country paid what, and which rows show streams but no pay — free, and it stays in your browser: https://musiciwant.com/musicians/distrokid
Last checked October 15, 2026. Sources marked “read as a summary” are pages we could see only as a search-result summary because the page itself would not open for us; we have kept those claims general and not quoted numbers from them. Per-stream figures are estimates from the two dated articles named below; none of them are ours.