Understanding the Money
What About Selling Downloads? (iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc.)
A download is a completely different kind of sale than a stream — instead of a fraction of a cent per play, it's a one-time purchase of the whole song, and the payout per unit is much larger.
$1.00 sale
→
~$0.30 to the store
→
~$0.70 to the rights holder
Both the iTunes Store and Amazon's MP3 store have historically operated on roughly this same model: the store keeps about 30% of the sale price, and the remaining 70% goes to whoever owns the recording. What happens to that 70% next depends entirely on the situation:
- Fully independent, self-distributed — the artist keeps the full ~70% themselves, minus whatever their distributor charges.
- Signed to a label — the label takes its cut first, based on the specific deal, then pays the artist their agreed share. Older-style royalty deals could leave the artist with a surprisingly small final amount; artist-friendly modern deals pay significantly more of that 70% through to the artist.
- Labels managing multiple artists — the same 70% split applies per release, so it's worth tracking download revenue separately from streaming revenue when reporting back to artists, since the per-unit economics are so different.
Downloads now make up a small share of total music revenue compared to streaming, so current, precise per-unit figures are harder to find publicly than streaming rates are, and the numbers above reflect historically cited industry patterns rather than an official, current rate from any store. For an exact number, your distributor's payout dashboard is the only fully accurate source.