Platforms and music labels are making profits hand-over-fist, but artists are making shockingly little money from popular online services. At this point, it might not even be worth the hassle of uploading their catalogs to begin with.

Musician and Redditor u/jogurpiano put together a pair of charts showing exactly how many individual song plays each service requires before they pay out a single dollar. Services dedicated to music streaming like Apple Music and Spotify look terrible, with a required 201 and 373-stream threshold, respectively, for just a buck.

Unfortunately, social media platforms that rely on licensed music are much, much worse. TikTok needs a song to hit 1,134 streams before the artist gets one measly dollar. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is even worse, with a 200,042-play threshold.

The data has been plotted below using both logarithmic and linear scales. You can tell it's a bad deal with the first chart, but the second one drives home just how indefensibly Meta is treating the musicians its platforms benefit from.

Click images to enlarge

Via Reddit.

[Image: Pixabay]