Aaron Dontez Yates, known more commonly by his rap name Tech N9ne, is a prolific and extremely successful independent rapper, with dozens of huge tracks under his belt, and well over a billion total streams across his discography. But how much does Spotify pay him?
Tech N9ne’s Business Successes
Tech N9ne not only earns money from music streaming, but from an array of other ventures.
He heads an extremely successful line of merchandise, with everything from hoodies to light switch covers up for sale. He hasn’t been shy when asked about this in the past, and it’s clear that his dedicated fanbase allows him to make millions per year from this avenue alone.
Combine this with touring, his car wash (yes, you can get a car wash at strange music) and countless other businesses and it’s safe to say Tech N9ne is making far more than just about any major label artist you can think of. He and his savvy team have built a complete empire, and it’s hard not to admire the hard work and unbelievable work ethic he has maintained for decades.
But enough about that part of his business, let’s look at the streaming money, specifically Spotify.
Tech N9ne’s Spotify Earnings
As Tech N9ne is an independent artist, he will be receiving the Lion’s share of the royalty income generated from his music. Based on his Spotify streaming data, he receives approx. 750,000 streams per day in total on Spotify alone. At a rate of around $2.50 per 1000 streams (I have placed this figure slightly on the higher end compared to my personal royalty data as he has a huge US based following), he is likely making at least $700,000 per year from Spotify alone.
This is a pretty decent figure, but once you take into account the cost of running Strange Music headquarters, as well as paying his producers and staff, it’s clear that when you’re running a business on the scale that Tech N9ne does, then Spotify Streams aren’t going to cut it as a sole source of income. That’s why his merchandise and touring is so lucrative. To make the same as he earns per year from Spotify, he would only need to sell a few thousand shirts to make the same money.
Tech N9ne’s Total Streaming Revenue
It’s more difficult to tell the overall sum as his total streaming data on other platforms isn’t easy to find, but based on the approximate market shares of other music streaming services as well as his massive YouTube following, a reasonable estimate for how much Tech N9ne makes from streaming in total per year is around the $2,000,000-$2,500,000 mark. Impressive!
His YouTube presence is arguably where a huge amount of his viewership is based, because of the effort put into his music videos. Sadly, based on the content within some of his tracks, it definitely isn’t guaranteed that he has managed to monetize all of his songs. I don’t think he really cares though.
Conclusion – How Much Does Tech N9ne Make From Spotify?
TLDR – I estimate that Tech N9ne, from his music catalogue alone, makes around $700,000 per year just on Spotify, by gaining around 750,000 streams per day and 273,000,000 streams per year. It’s an impressive sum, but it just goes to show that there are a lot of other businesses that are more lucrative than the music streaming game. 273 million streams is an unbelievable sum, and is far harder to achieve than a lot of other ways to make $700,000 per year.
So what do you think? Did this figure surprise you? Was it higher or lower than you expected? Leave a comment below.
