My recommended: don’t use online streaming calculators. They almost always misrepresent how the royalties really work. Spotify royalties are not a constant. Based on the calculator you’ve used, it’s expecting .0035 per stream, and Spotify hasn’t been paying out that well in a long time. So, what’s the issue? First off, different countries have different rates. Seconds, different plans (free, premium, family) have different rates. Lastly, it helps to understand how Spotify collects and pays out their money: it’s a pool. The money from the streams is all added together, and then they look at the share of those streams that your music got, and then they divide it all up. Because the number of streamers (revenue) and the number of stream (divisions) will vary, the rate per stream will further vary. What will help is if you look at Excruciating Details and see how much the streams are actually worth. Overtime, you’ll start to see a pattern of which streams are the premium and which are the free, which countries your audience is most active in. But for the most part, this is just how Spotify has always been. Which is why I don’t understand why scammers target Spotify for easy money, when it doesn’t really pay out. More on reddit.com

As far as I know Spotify pays differently depending on the region, so a play from South America is worth less than a play from the US. Also, I recall hearing that whether the listener has free or paid Spotify miiiight affect it? I'm not sure about this though but you'll probably find an answer online. Edit: also, does your distributor take a cut? More on reddit.com

In here before everyone piles on with all of the useless "just do it for the love man" / "if you're doing music for money you got it all wrong" comments lol (sorry guys, fair points as always but kinda unhelpful ultimately) It depends more on how many streams you're raking in per month. And beyond that, it depends on so many more factors such as what country are those streams coming from and are they coming from discovery mode etc. In general though, 1 million streams on Spotify might pay out on average about $3k-$4k. If you have 1 million monthly's, ideally you'd earn much more than just 1 million streams per month. For example, I've got about 8k monthly, I've got about 300 songs on spotify, and I get around 40k streams. That's about 5× streams to monthly's. So let's say I've got about 1 million monthly's and stay on track with streams. That'd be about 5 million streams, or $15k-20k per month. Not bad. Keep in mind though, it varies per artist, per country, per discography, etc, and only if you own 100% of your masters as I do. Know what you're giving up before you sign to any labels.. Also keep in mind that royalty's are just one income out of many that come with having a fanbase. It can stack. And it can be a lot of fun if you're putting out music that inspires you AND it's landing with people, and saving you from a boring office job. I mean err.... money bad, art good. Just do it for fun man. If you're doing music for money, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, cause how dare you earn a living and enjoy what you do /s More on reddit.com

I make about 500 monthly from Spotify, due to being on editorial playlists and then in turn getting streams from algorithmic playlists. My advice is to release as much music as possible! I released once a month ish for a year before I pitched to editors, I got on a playlist and then had 8 over a year and half (with monthly releases). Once I bumped up to once a week releases, I’ve had huge success with playlists. Also, fill out your profile as much as possible to make your profile as valuable for the consumer as possible (full bio, pics, user playlists, big discography). And finally, hone in on what playlists you want to be on. Make your music ‘fit in’ while at the same time bringing something to the table that the other songs don’t. I consider myself very lucky to get as many editorial playlist placements as I have (25 since May 2022), and my strategy to maximize that success has been releasing as much music as possible. I don’t think this works for every artist, but it has helped me big time, since I’m able to out work artists in my genre (jazz), who don’t usually release too often More on reddit.com