Median UK musician earned £1,140 from streaming last year, study finds

The typical British musician earned £1,140 from streaming last year, according to the largest survey of artists’ income yet carried out in the UK, a figure its authors say is “less than a fortnight of rehearsal room hire” and that has revived a campaign for a statutory minimum per-stream payment.

The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Leeds for the Musicians’ Union and published on Monday, surveyed 3,800 working musicians across genres and found that while total UK streaming revenue reached a record £1.9bn in 2025, the median artist’s share of it had risen by only £60 since 2021. One in four respondents earned less than £100 from streaming in the year; 3% earned more than £50,000.

The lead author, Dr Naomi Clarke, said the gap was explained less by the per-stream rate, which the study put at between £2 and £4 per 1,000 streams after label and distributor deductions, than by the distribution of listening. “The top 1% of tracks take around 60% of all streams,” she said. “The system is not paying musicians badly on average. It is paying a very small number very well and almost everyone else nothing, and the average hides that.”

The union is calling for a minimum payment to the featured artist of 1p a stream, regardless of their contract with a label, a mechanism it says would cost the industry around £180m a year and would lift the median artist’s income from streaming to roughly £3,000. The proposal was discussed by a parliamentary committee in 2023 but has not been adopted; the government said at the time that it preferred an industry-led solution.

The record labels’ trade body disputed the study’s framing. A spokesperson said labels now paid artists an average royalty rate of 26% on streaming, up from 18% a decade ago, and that a per-stream floor “would take money from the artists people listen to and give it to artists they do not, which is a political choice rather than a market one”. Streaming services have argued that their payouts to rights holders have grown every year and that how the money is split is a matter for labels and artists.

Among musicians surveyed, 71% said they now relied on live work for the majority of their income, and 38% said they had taken a job outside music in the past two years to subsidise their careers. Amara Osei, a 31-year-old singer from Bristol whose two albums have been streamed 14m times, said she had received £9,200 in total from those streams. “That is less than my van cost,” she said. “I am not asking to be rich. I am asking for the maths to look like the numbers on the screen.”

The culture select committee is expected to call witnesses on streaming remuneration in the new year.