We saw a post by someone on a Facebook group who asked if a fully specced Apple Mac Pro would be suitable to run Logic Pro. It should be powerful to run a mission to Mars!
However, we wanted to know the answer to a different question. How many Spotify streams would it take to pay for an Apple Mac Pro - in other words how soon could you expect to get a return on investment if you were trying to make a living on streaming services?
Apple Mac Pro Specifications
We decided to price up a fully loaded Apple Mac Pro, here’s the spec:
2.5GHz 28‑core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz
1.5TB (12x128GB) of DDR4 ECC memory
Two Radeon Pro W6800X Duo with 64GB of GDDR6 memory each
8TB SSD storage
Stainless steel frame with feet
Magic Mouse
Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad - US English
Accessory Kit
And the dollar price for that on the Apple online store is $50,199.00
You would also need to buy a monitor and a copy of Logic. You would also need at least a pair of headphones or speakers, a microphone and an audio interface if you wanted to get any sound in.
How Many Streams To Pay For It?
Setting aside all the additional stuff needed, here’s the numbers.
To pay for the Apple Mac Pro alone by relying on Spotify streams you would need around 22,000,000 (22 million) streams to make $52,360, that would be if you had 100% royalty share and were not giving any percentages to third parties such as labels or management. This is using the worldwide average royalty rate for listener location according to the Spotify Royalties Calculator on Soundcamps.com. The royalty rate varies considerably depending on where your listeners are in the world. Another site claimed it would take around 12,500,000 streams. Whichever calculation is right it’s a lot of streams.
To put that in context let’s look at how likely it is to get those kind of numbers on Spotify. According to Spotify themselves on their website Loud and Clear; “over 207,000 songs were streamed over a million times in 2020 alone.”
Spotify has over 70 million songs on the service with 60k added every day. That means 0.3% of all songs streamed reach 1 million streams… remember to earn enough to buy the Mac Pro we’ve shown above you’d need between 12 - 22 million streams!
You Can Still Buy A Mac
All is not lost though, you can always just go for the entry level MacBook Pro costing $1999. That’s only 840,000 streams! If you’re one of the lucky 0.3% to get 1 million streams then you’ll soon have yourself an entry level MacBook Pro.
Of course, all of this is a little tongue in cheek, but it does highlight a very real issue. If you want to build an income stream based around streaming services, then make sure you’ve done your homework before you invest in a lot of studio gear.