The per-stream rate does not exist, and the tables that publish one are reconstructions

Spotify states that it does not pay a per-stream rate. Revenue is pooled and divided by streamshare, which means the number people call "the rate" is an average computed after the money has already been divided. No streaming service publishes a per-country payout rate. Every table you have seen with a column of tiny decimals next to country names was reconstructed from other people's statements, not copied from a published figure — and we are not going to reproduce or estimate one here.

What "pooled and divided by streamshare" actually describes

The mechanism is not a price list. It is a division.

A service collects money in a market over a period: subscription revenue from the people who pay for it, advertising revenue from the people who do not. Some share of that money goes into a pool for rights holders. The pool is then divided among recordings according to their share of total streams in that market and period. Your recording's payment is the pool multiplied by your share of the streams.

Nothing in that arithmetic contains a rate. There is no step where a service looks up a per-play price and multiplies. The per-stream figure only exists afterwards, if someone takes an amount they were paid, divides it by the plays it corresponds to, and reports the quotient. That quotient is a description of one payout period for one catalogue in one set of markets. It is a result, not an input.

This is why the same artist gets a different "rate" every month without anything about their music changing. The pool moved. The denominator moved. Their share of the denominator moved.

Why per-country numbers move, and why nobody publishes them

Per-country differences follow from local subscription pricing and local ad rates. A market where the standard subscription costs less puts less money per subscriber into the pool. A market where advertisers pay less for an impression puts less money per ad-supported listener into the pool. The division then proceeds the same way it does everywhere else.

That is the whole explanation, and it is worth sitting with because it disposes of two bad readings at once. It is not that a service has decided your country is worth less per play. It is also not that streaming in your country is somehow free of economics. The pool in a market is built from what people and advertisers in that market actually pay, and it is divided by how much listening happens there.

No service publishes a per-country payout rate. Not Spotify, not any of the others. So when a table gives you a figure for, say, twelve countries to four decimal places, ask where the figure came from. It came from someone's payout statement, or from an aggregate of several people's statements, or from a third party's estimate of those. There is no published number behind it to check it against. A reconstruction can be honest and still be a reconstruction, and a reconstruction should never be presented in the visual grammar of a rate card.

What you can and cannot control

Sort the variables by whether you can touch them.

You cannot control:

• The size of the pool in any market. It is set by subscription pricing and ad rates you have no part in.
• Total streams in that market — the denominator. Everyone else's listening is in it.
• The exchange rate between the currency the pool was collected in and the currency you are paid in.
• Statutory withholding on US-sourced royalties. Without a W-8BEN on file the statutory rate is 30%. With a treaty, the copyright-royalty rate is what the treaty says: 0% for Pakistan, 10% for Morocco, Turkey and Indonesia, 15% for Egypt, Tunisia and India, per IRS Table 1, Rev. May 2023. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and Brazil have no treaty, so it is the statutory 30% with no relief.
• Your bank or payment provider's transfer fee.

You can control:

• Whether the W-8BEN exists at all. This is the single largest controllable number on this list, and it is a form. Line 6 accepts a foreign tax identification number; most artists do not need a US ITIN. The form is valid through the last day of the third succeeding calendar year.
• Your share of the streams — not by tricking the denominator, but by the ordinary work of being listened to more.
• The commission taken between the pool and you. This is the other controllable number, and it is the one the per-stream tables never show, because a commission is not a rate either. It is a fraction of whatever the division produced.

The arithmetic a revenue-share free tier performs on the pool

Here is the part that a per-stream table structurally cannot express. Whatever the pool pays out, a commission is applied to it afterwards. The commission is a percentage, so it survives every change in the pool. If the pool halves, the commission still takes its share of the half.

The percentages are published, and they vary more than most people expect:

Read the ONErpm and CD Baby rows again. The percentage depends on where the money came from, and the same play can be routed through more than one of those columns depending on the surface it happened on. That is a second division, layered on top of the first one, and it is invisible in any table organised by country and decimal places.

The honest way to compare services is therefore not to argue about per-stream figures at all. It is to compare the published percentages, per revenue type, and to notice which ones are not published. Across the whole category, takedown fees and catalogue transfer fees are not published by anyone, either way. The absence is itself the finding.

Where Mazufa sits in this, stated plainly

Mazufa's commission is 0%. We take no commission and no percentage of royalties. Royalties received for a release are passed through in full.

The practical consequence is narrow and specific, so we will state it narrowly: the pool division is the only division that applies to a Mazufa release. Whatever the streamshare arithmetic produces is what there is. We do not apply a second percentage to it, and there is no revenue type — social, video, downloads, sync — where a different number quietly applies.

Two things are still not ours, and we will not pretend otherwise. A bank or payment provider's transfer fee is charged by that bank or provider, and statutory withholding such as US tax is charged by a tax authority. Neither is a Mazufa deduction, and neither is something we can waive. We are not going to promise that you receive 100% of the money that lands in your bank account, because we do not control the last two steps of that journey. What we control is our own percentage, and it is zero.

Releasing is free: no upload fee, no subscription, no per-release charge. Mazufa is invite-only, and every complete application gets a human review.

How to read the next payout statement you get

Do this instead of hunting for a rate.

1. Take the total, not the quotient. Your statement's period total is a real, checkable number. A per-stream average derived from it tells you less than the total already did.
2. Split it by revenue type before you compare anything. Streaming, downloads, social video, sync and mechanicals are separately commissioned nearly everywhere. Comparing a blended figure to someone else's blended figure compares two different mixes.
3. Look for the withholding line. If it says 30% and you are in a treaty country, you have found a form you have not filed. That is a larger and more certain gain than anything a per-stream comparison could ever produce.
4. Identify the fee that is a bank's, not a distributor's. Then judge the distributor on what it actually charged.
5. Compare percentages, not decimals. A published percentage can be checked on a company's own page. A per-stream figure cannot be checked anywhere, because no service publishes one.

If you want to see what the free and cheap tiers actually cost once the percentages are laid out side by side, our comparison of them lives at /what-free-costs. It is free, and it cites the page and read date for every figure, so you can check us.

That is the standard we would like applied to us as well. Any number in this article that you cannot trace to a named source and a date is a number we should not have written.

Sources

• Spotify's own statement that it does not pay a per-stream rate, and that revenue is pooled and divided by streamshare, with per-country differences following from local subscription pricing and ad rates. No per-country payout rate is published by Spotify or any other service.
• IRS Table 1, Rev. May 2023 — statutory 30% withholding with no W-8BEN on file; treaty copyright-royalty rates of 0% (Pakistan), 10% (Morocco, Turkey, Indonesia), 15% (Egypt, Tunisia, India); no treaty for Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Brazil.
• RouteNote — https://support.routenote.com/kb-article/what-percentage-does-routenote-take/ — read 2026-09-08
• ONErpm — https://onerpm.com/onerpm-answers-common-questions/ — read 2026-09-08
• CD Baby — https://support.cdbaby.com/hc/en-us/articles/213125406-How-much-does-CD-Baby-cost — read 2026-09-08
• iMusician — https://imusician.pro/en/pricing — read 2026-09-08
• Madverse — https://www.madverse.co/pricing — read 2026-09-08
• The Black Turn — https://theblackturn.com/pages/pricing — read 2026-09-08
• Bandcamp — https://get.bandcamp.help/en/articles/15263193-what-are-bandcamp-s-fees — read 2026-09-08
• Amuse — https://www.amuse.io/en/pricing/ — read 2026-09-08
• TuneCore — https://www.tunecore.com/pricing — read 2026-09-08
• Ditto Music — https://dittomusic.com/en/pricing/ — read 2026-09-08
• Songtrust — https://www.songtrust.com/pricing — read 2026-09-08