'Spotify are selling adverts, not music': how to stream ethically

Major services pay musicians as little as £0.004 per stream, a rate it’s impossible to live on. What other options are there?

In September, independent singer and songwriter Miri earned £44.30 in one week for 1,772 streams of her music on Sonstream, a new streaming service based in Stoke-on-Trent. “Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, for me, that’s money towards food and electricity,” she says. Her equivalent earnings on Spotify would have been less than £5.

“It was such a pleasant surprise and also highlighted to me that if streaming was fixed, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to go through emergency funding when the pandemic hit,” she adds.

Related: Music streaming makes major labels rich, while musicians like me go broke | Nadine Shah