How Much Money Does A Number 1 Hit Make

How Much Money Can My HIT SONG Make In One Year? (You'll be SURPRISED :( -)

It's actually quite amazing how much revenue a hit song can generate once you take into account all the various branches of monetization strategies independant AND signed artists can take in today's music distribution and licensing eco-system.

First — let's take a look at streaming sites that pay you per stream, and or per ad placement and who pays best:

I didn't even know xBox pays out so much — but it's because they have the smallest market share, and vice versa for the monopolizing google/youtube payouts.

So let's start with getting your son g onto all the stores and streaming sites >> , most of your money is going to come from Spotify and Youtube (ok AND Apple/iTunes and Amazon..) as those alone account for close to 90% of the market.

Payouts range but we'll estimate that your track is getting millions of plays which will average out to $4,000 per million spins on Spotify, and will range for the rest as they don't have nearly the market so we'll say another $4,000 spread across the rest of the sites. That's 8K per million streams (again, mostly coming from Spotify and Youtube Rev).

For this example we'll say the artist is getting 10million plays per month — that's already $80,000.00 — PER MONTH. (most HITS don't stop there though, a BILLION plays or youtube views is not that uncommon anymore).

Now — if you have a fanbase like above — it won't take long for you to start getting booked and doing shows, walkthroughs, guest appearances etc.

Most newer artists range from 5K to 20K per show depending on how many tickets your name on a flyer can sell out. If you start getting known as talent that sells out venues, you're going to become a (lucrative) hot commodity in no time and your pricing will increase accordingly.

Let's assume you are getting booked 3 times a week at 10K per show. That's 30K a week, 120K a month.

Now we'll take a look at other arists asking you for features on their tracks, again this is where you can charge what you're worth, and 5K — 10K is actually reasonable for features. Let's say you're doing three features a month (that is very conservative), at 10K a piece, that's another 30K, a month!

Merchandising — you have fans! You might not think they'll buy your shirts/products/stuff with your logo on it, but it will count for a big part of your revenue potential. Let's be conservative here though and say you'll bring in an additional 5K a month on people ordering your merch online and buying it at your shows.

Backstage, signings, chill sessions. Upselling your ticket holders at shows to behind the scenes and backstage access passes can very easily add thousands to your show money, and often surpass it to double/triple what you got paid to just perform.

Backstage passes $200, signing and a picture another $350, do that with 40 fans per show and you've added an easy 8K on passes and 14K on pics and signatures, that's 22K per show, we'll round it down to 20K to be conservative. Three shows a week, that's 60K x 4 weeks/a month = $240,000/month.

Licensing to film/tv/adnetowrks. If your tracks end up getting picked up by film, tv, ads, games, miscellaneous placements, this can quickly add a lot of reveneue to your bottom line. I'm not going to include any numbers here as it's all over the board so we're not assigning a value to this equation, just letting you know to expect this to happen on a hit.

Endorsements, brand ambassadorship, advertising. If you end up signing an endorsement deal with a brand (let's say headphones), this can easily amount to hundreds of thousands or millions for mid-tier to established level artists. We'll round this out to 250K for a one year run with a brand, and we'll do it with two brands, that's now 500K (again being conservative) added to your revenue.

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Now let's look at the years end and how we did after 12 months on a HIT release:
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Streams — spotify, youtube, the rest = 12 x $80,000 = $960,000

Show money = 12 x $120,000 = $1,440,000

Features on other tracks = 12 x $30,000 = $360,000

Merch = 12 x $5,000 = $60,000

Backstage/signings = 12 x $240,000 = $3,168,000

Endorsements = $500,000

— Total = $6,488,000.00

(conservatively, easily double/triple on big hits)

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$6.5 Million dollars and A LOT of momentum built up for your follow up releases that will hopefully match or outdo your first hit.

There are other things to consider like content claims on youtube/facebook where people try to re-upload your track, or remix it, or do an instrumental version, etc. and you can snipe back those lost profits.

Anyway — Now you see why so many artists are GUNNING for a spot in the charts and doing whatever they can to get their music heard.

Step one though — is to find a great music distributor and get on spotify, iTunes, all other stores. This is the company that will be responsible for getting your music onto all the platforms and paying you your royalties. Look for companies that payout monthly, and that offer revenue splitting on releases so you can do collabs and everyone is paid out directly from the distributor ensuring everyone gets paid and deals don't change overnight re % changes..

So — if you're an artist, label, audio catalog owner, you might want to start doing your research on getting your tracks out there as soon as possible — you might be sitting on millions and not even know it until you release your art/music to the world!

Start with a great distributor >>