I'm with the brand: how musicians make money beyond streaming

To understand how musicians make money today, it helps to look back. In 1999, Napster launched and, in doing so, reset the value of recorded music. That same year marked the peak of global recorded music revenue at $22 billion, a figure that wouldn't be surpassed for more than two decades.

What followed was a slow unbundling of value. Apple's iTunes Store shifted listening away from albums and toward individual tracks. Then came streaming. By 2010, it was worth roughly $500 million. Five years later, that number had more than quadrupled. Add YouTube, smartphones and plan bundling, and streaming didn't kill piracy by policing it — it out-convenienced it.

Fast forward to today, and streaming isn't the challenger; it's the system. For artists, it's never been easier to release music or reach a global audience. Distribution is solved. But, despite the prevalence of performing rights organizations, income isn't. For most artists, streams pay in fractions. Unless you're operating at scale, the numbers rarely stack up.

How much money do musicians make? It's a notoriously difficult question to answer, with many variables depending on location, genre, experience (as in any industry) and whether an artist is signed to a label or is independent. According to Indeed data, the average earnings for a musician in the US are $52,764 per year, though this likely skews higher due to higher earners, particularly signed artists. The median figure is likely to be far less.

Perhaps the more important question is, how do music artists make money?

Sync deals

Synchronization accounts for just 4% of recorded music revenue in the US, according to the RIAA. A small slice of the pie, but one that can deliver outsized returns for the artists who land the right placement.

For East London band Trailer Trash Tracys, a sync deal with Renault proved exactly that. Despite early momentum — touring with The xx, releasing on Domino, and earning coverage in The Guardian and Pitchfork — it was a single track, "You Wish You Were Red," that delivered their biggest payday.

"Sometimes tracks get syncs out of the blue, you almost can't predict it," says bassist and producer Jimmy Lee.

The Domino connection helped. With publishing teams actively pitching music across London and New York, the band's track made it into the consideration set — already a significant advantage. From there, selection was far from linear. "It was 60% going to the other track… but the focus group picked us."

Aside from the fee — "six figures in the end" — there was the ripple effect of recognition. "We were the top 10 most Shazamed that week," and a new legion of fans, "we played in Belgium, and people would come up to us and say, 'we heard your song on this advert'. For a small band, it had a big impact." "You Wish You Were Red" was synchronized elsewhere, including television shows, and continues to generate royalties for the band long after they've released new music.

Brand endorsements

Brand partnerships have long been part of music's commercial ecosystem, but their role has evolved. As recording revenues have flattened, they've become a more visible — and often necessary — part of an artist's income mix.

"Brands inherently aren't very authentic; it's their nature to sell products," says David Holt, Chief Brand Officer of music magazine turned auction platform Wax Poetics. "Authenticity… isn't a given. It has to be earned."

In 2025, Wax Poetics partnered with Chanel on a campaign featuring Solange, Neneh Cherry, Yukimi Nagano and Angèle. On paper, it was an unlikely pairing: a crate-digging music publication and a Parisian luxury fashion house. In practice, the value exchange was clear. "Solange knew our editorial heft and was OK to be associated with that," Holt explains. "And she was very aware that Chanel was providing the check."

The partnership worked because both sides understood what the other needed. Brands bring budget, distribution, and scale. Artists bring credibility and cultural relevance. But neither is enough on its own.

The missing piece is distribution. Cultural credibility alone doesn't guarantee reach — it needs amplification. As Holt puts it, "working in culture doesn't guarantee your views, the brand needs to pay for the views." In other words, the partnership may be rooted in alignment, but its impact is still driven by media.

But what about musicians who are starting out and aren't on a record label; how can they land a brand deal? "It's not necessarily about saying yes," Holt says. "It's sometimes about saying no and being selective."

There is also a wider ecosystem of brand agencies, media owners and specialist platforms to be aware of and engage with through music and content seeding. It might not result in a sponsorship with Chanel, but it could earn you a month's rent, advance access to production software, or a free set of drumsticks.

Touring and merchandise

If streaming builds the audience, touring and merch are where artists try to make it pay. "You need to play more shows because no artist outside the top 100 is earning a great deal from streaming," says Adam Gainsborough, founding director of This Is Now Agency, a specialist booking and tour management company for independent artists.

Post-COVID, the live music industry has experienced unprecedented growth, and in 2025 Live Nation posted an annual revenue $25.2 billion with 9% growth year-on-year. Although in the US, "where visas are so incredibly expensive and with being very selective with who they let in right now, tours just don't financially stack up just because the costs outweigh everything." Even sold-out shows at the grassroots level can yield as little as $100 a night for the artist. For fans, ticket prices are rising. For artists, margins are shrinking.

In the past year alone, even established artists have been forced to step back from the road. Little Simz canceled her North American tour, explaining in a tweet that "being an independent artist, I pay for everything encompassing my live performances out of my own pocket and touring the US for a month would leave me in a huge deficit." The issue isn't new, but it's becoming harder to ignore. This is especially true for touring bands and more elaborate live shows.

The silver lining appears in the shape of a t-shirt (or a baseball cap or One Direction duct tape) "merch is a huge revenue stream for artists and one that should be really on your list," according to Gainsborough. At Coachella 2026, Justin Bieber leveraged his headline set to promote his SKYLRK fashion brand, generating a record breaking $15 million in festival merchandise sales.

Yet artists across the spectrum are transforming what was once a humble marketing tool into a genuine revenue driver. Gainsborough works with an individual who has made "£125k in live… probably that again in merch." Depending on how it's produced and sold, an artist can receive 100% of the revenue made on merchandise.

The math is stark considering what a stream actually pays. A $30 t-shirt at a show is worth roughly 7,500 Spotify streams.

For independent artists, the fundamentals are simpler. Start small. Keep the team lean. Focus on selling out rooms, not filling them. Build a direct relationship with fans. Because, as Gainsborough puts it, "for a true music fan, nothing beats a live gig."

Streaming: don't leave money on the table

While sync, brand deals, tours and merch sales can all contribute towards a music artist's salary, streaming still makes up a big piece of the pie, and often the biggest — with estimates ranging from 10–60% of annual income comes from streaming for more established artists. But even here, value from the different types of royalties is being lost for artists at all stages of their careers.

In the US alone, an estimated $1.38 billion in music revenue goes uncollected each year — not from piracy, but from music played in commercial spaces without proper licensing. Shops, gyms and hospitality venues all rely on music to shape their environments, yet much of that usage goes unpaid.

For artists, it's another reminder that where music is played matters just as much as how often. In the end, it's part of why businesses pay for music: there's a broader acceptance that proper artist compensation is a problem that can be solved.

Soundtrack launched in 2013 to address a gap in the market: music was being played in business spaces without properly rewarding artists. It provides a licensed, business-ready platform that matches the scale of modern streaming but uses a different economic model.

On the Soundtrack Unlimited plan, a single play can return up to five times more to an artist than a personal streaming service.