This is the real cost of living in Spotify streams

Have you ever wondered exactly how many times you would need to stream somebody's music on a platform like Spotify in order for them to be able to afford some everyday purchases?

One studious internet user did have that thought recently and has crunched some numbers based on exactly how much money people earn from their music being listened to through the streaming platform.

Alex Leonard, a web developer who is taking time out from that role to focus full-time on music, found that people would need to listen to one of his tracks 8,459 times in order for him to be able to afford to purchase a double-LP. 

A litre of milk works out as 311 streams while a standard cup of coffee from a coffee shop works out at 1015 streams. Leonard does caveat however that the figures are only estimates, and that the figures are mostly based on data on the cost of living in Berlin. 

"Additionally, the actual amount earned per stream varies hugely, even on a single service," he adds "For these calculations I’ve used figures from 2018 from a mid-sized indie label which generates almost 1 billion streams annually – enough of a data set to be considered fairly accurate."

You can see all of the figures for yourself and read all about his data crunching here.

Spotify recently acquired SoundBetter, the music talent marketplace that's described as the "de facto LinkedIn for music professionals".

The platform also extended its free trial to three months for new subscribers over the summer.