I'm going to look at music streaming numbers to demonstrate just how little artists get paid through streaming. My primary dataset is from a website called the Trichordist, which was anonymously given per-stream numbers for 2019 from a mid-sized indie label. (Streaming companies are notoriously very secretive about these numbers.) Some key figures from the Trichordist's data: the average payment per stream across all platforms is $0.00173, for Spotify it's $0.00348. That means Spotify is paying out $3,300-$3,500 per million plays. From these numbers, we can extrapolate other ways to illustrate the data: to earn just a dollar on Spotify, your song would have to be played 287 times. These numbers can also be used to estimate how much money a single song earned on Spotify. I will also provide additional context on what a "per-stream" rate actually means and how they're calculated.