Streaming Royalties: Beatport Supports Artists with Highest Streaming Payout Rate

Make no mistake, because this is something we are very proud of at Beatport: in 2022, the company sold 25,519,770 song downloads — making up nearly 12% of all tracks downloaded globally. But equally important is the news that over the past two years, streaming has grown by 60% at Beatport. That’s a jump supported by the platform’s push to appeal to the next generation of DJs, who use the service in a particularly active way rather than the passive way listeners often engage with music on other platforms in the background. Beatport’s customers in particular tend to engage with electronic music as DJs, as consumers and as champions of the genre.

So in terms of supporting artists, it’s fair to say that Beatport – whose customers are more active in the way they consume their music than on other streaming services – really get to feel the benefit of the way the company does business. At a time when subscription services including Apple Music and Amazon Music have raised their monthly prices, Beatport’s royalty payouts have been boosted by higher subscription rates. While the service provides a standard $9.99 subscription offer, it also has tiers at $14.99 and $29.99 that allow for integrations with other DJ software like Serato and Traktor, and being able to play songs while offline — and all highly important functions for DJs.

In 2022, Beatport paid an average of $0.10808333 per stream, while its service aimed at open-format DJs, Beatsource, averaged $ 0.17773333 per stream — that’s more than 30 times the industry-wide blended average streaming rates across platforms in the United States was $.0053 per stream.

In a recent interview for Billboard, Beatport’s CEO Robb McDaniels detailed how valuable DJ culture and Beatport are to the growth of the music ecosystem. “We need to make sure that as an industry, we’re serving this constituency correctly and delivering the types of products they need.” Robb also touched on the importance and value that DJs play in “the overall ecosystem and not treat them the same as any other customer.”

A final quote from Robb to close out sums up the importance of supporting artists the correct route and the right way: “The copyright holders are the ones who benefit. [At Beatport,] we’re constantly working with labels and publishers to clear derivative works, remixes, stems. We try to point out how important it is to the health of the overall music industry, and that this benefits them in a myriad of ways beyond just the download fee or the stream fee. There are a lot of positive benefits.”

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