How Much Music Would You Need to Sell to Make Minimum Wage as a Musician?

People immediately assume that musicians who release an album get rich quickly. Even if they're not a huge band or artist, people mistakenly believe that they are suddenly swimming in cash!

This is far from the case.

It's crazy how hard it is for an artist to make money from music sales. Especially with music streaming services, it can be ridiculously hard to make any money.

Spotify talks like you make a lot of money from streaming on their service, but to make minimum wage off of Spotify streaming every month, people would have to play your song MORE THAN 4 MILLION TIMES EVERY MONTH!

Yes, that's more than 4 million times every month.  4,053,110 times EVERY MONTH, for the musician to make minimum wage every month.

The numbers get really bad once a big record label gets involved, but it can be hard to make money on your own, still.

To make minimum wage every month, and you made your own CDs for sale, you'd have to sell 143 every month!

If you stream on Rhapsody, you'd have to have your song played 849,817 times every month!

This is why most musicians tour so much, because the only money they're making is off of merchandise sales and ticket sales for the shows.  The labels and the music buying money isn't paying the bills.

What does this mean for us?

Go to shows, support the bands, help them survive.