There is no such thing as a per-stream rate
Spotify states it plainly: it does not pay artists according to a per-play or per-stream rate. It pools net revenue from subscriptions and advertising, then divides it by streamshare — if your music accounts for one percent of all streams, you receive roughly one percent of the pool. Everything else follows from that. Payouts differ between countries because each territory has its own revenue pool, set by local subscription prices, local advertising rates and currency, divided by local listening volume. That is a consequence of the model, not a published price list. No streaming service on earth publishes a per-country rate, which is why this calculator asks for the figure from your own statements instead of inventing one for you.
The 30% that disappears before anyone tells you
Royalties sourced in the United States are subject to withholding at the statutory foreign-person rate of 30% unless you file a valid Form W-8BEN. Whether filing lowers that rate depends entirely on whether your country has an income tax treaty with the US. Egypt is 15%, Morocco 10%, Turkey 10%, Indonesia 10%, Tunisia 15%, India 15%, and Pakistan is 0%. But Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria and Brazil have no treaty at all — the statutory 30% applies and no reduction is available. Filing the form is still correct there, because it establishes your foreign status, but it will not lower the rate. Almost nobody explains this before an artist signs up.
You almost certainly do not need a US tax number
This is the single most common reason artists abandon a distribution signup, and it rests on a misunderstanding. The official W-8BEN instructions say that to claim treaty benefits you may complete line 5 with a US SSN or ITIN, or line 6 with a foreign tax identification number. A foreign TIN — the tax number your own country already issued you — is generally sufficient. Most artists never need to apply for a US ITIN at all. The form then stays valid through the last day of the third calendar year after you sign it, so it is roughly a three-year task rather than an annual one.
Why a percentage and a flat fee are not comparable in the abstract
A flat annual fee is cheap if you earn a lot and expensive if you earn nothing, because you pay it either way. Our commission is 0%, so there's no crossover to work out: a release that earns nothing costs nothing, and a release that earns a great deal still costs nothing on our side. The calculator above compares your numbers against a flat-fee competitor so you can see the difference for yourself. We would rather you knew.
What we deliberately refuse to show you
We do not show a payout rate for your country, because no service publishes one and we will not invent a number about your income. We do not tell you whether PayPal, Payoneer or Wise can receive money where you live — we tried to verify it and could not, because the official country lists are either unreadable to automated checks or return errors, and a guess about whether you can be paid at all is worse than an admission that we do not know. We do not publish withdrawal fees, currency spreads or minimum payout thresholds for the same reason. Where a gap exists in this tool, it is a gap we found rather than one we filled.
Sources. Withholding rates and treaty articles: IRS Table 1, Rev. May 2023 (irs.gov/pub/irs-lbi/tax-treaty-table-1.pdf) and the IRS list of treaties in force. Form mechanics: Instructions for Form W-8BEN, Rev. October 2021. Streamshare model: Spotify's own royalties documentation and Loud & Clear. Per-1,000-stream reference figures: Duetti 2024 Music Economics Report — an estimate from Duetti's own independent-catalogue sample, primarily US and UK, not an official rate and not per-country. Distributor pricing: each vendor's own pricing page, fetched 7 September 2026; entry tier only. Treaty tables carry footnotes that can condition a rate, and the table is over three years old — verify before relying on it.