← Business Metric: Industry Specific (Consumer, Services & Financial) (all topics)
Per-stream rates
What it is
What a rights holder earns each time a track is played. Almost all platforms use a pro-rata model - all subscription and ad revenue in a market goes into one pool, split by each track's share of total streams
Rates therefore are not fixed prices but outcomes, and vary widely by platform and listener geography: a paid US play is worth many times a free Indian one
Impact on industries
- The rights holder controls neither variable that determines income - pool size is set by platform pricing, and the denominator grows with every new upload
- Indian rates sit at the bottom of the global range because the pool is small and mostly ad-funded, so domestic volume converts poorly into revenue
- Track supply is expanding far faster than the pool, so average per-stream rates drift down even as total industry streaming revenue grows
- The paid-subscription shift attacks this directly - each conversion enlarges the pool without adding streams, which is the only lever that raises rates structurally