Ditto survey: 74% of independent artists earned under $1,000 from music in 2025

Ditto Music, a distributor, published its Independent Music Report 2026 on 29 Sep 2026. It surveyed 5,039 independent artists in 112 countries. The headline: 74% said they earned less than $1,000 from music in 2025. Ditto's CEO, Matt Parsons, says artists now have "unprecedented access to audiences, technology and global distribution". The rest of the report shows how little that access is paying.

What did the survey find?

According to the report:

• Income. 74% earned under $1,000 from music last year. Only 9% earned $5,000 or more, and 4% earned $15,000 or more.
• Work. 64% have a full-time or part-time job outside music. 22% say music is their full-time job.
• Outlook. 29% think their music income will be sustainable for the next three years, 34% think it won't, and 37% don't know.
• Quitting. 32% considered quitting music in the past year. Among US respondents it was 43%.
• Touring. 82% say they can't currently afford touring costs. Streaming royalties are the most commonly named biggest income source, with live shows second.
• What would help. 43% say money is the biggest barrier to growth. Asked what would most improve their situation, artists chose better discovery tools (43%) and higher streaming royalty rates (41%).

The press release says the biggest sources of stress were financial pressure, followed by marketing and self-promotion at 23.5%. It also says 47% of respondents use AI when making music, mostly for help with mixing, mastering and vocal tuning rather than generating whole songs.

Who was actually asked?

This is a vendor survey, so the details of who answered matter. The report page says every respondent had released music through Ditto. That makes this a picture of active, paying, self-releasing artists, not of all musicians. The biggest groups of respondents were in the US (1,180), the UK (1,003) and South Africa (929). Ditto doesn't publish survey dates or say whether the results were weighted. The figures are Ditto's own, and nobody has checked them independently.

Look closely at the 82% touring figure before you read it as a trend. Ditto's January 2025 release reported 82.1% from a different survey of 1,500 artists. Two samples gave nearly the same answer, which suggests the touring problem is stable. It doesn't show things getting worse.

How does this square with Spotify's numbers?

In March, Spotify said in its Loud & Clear update that it paid the music industry more than $11 billion in 2025, and that roughly half of those royalties were generated by independent artists and labels. It also said the 100,000th-highest-earning artist generated more than $7,300 from Spotify alone, compared with about $350 for the artist in that position in 2015.

Both claims can be true at once. Spotify's figures describe the top 100,000 artists. Ditto's describe ordinary self-releasers, and three-quarters of them made less than a seventh of that $7,300 from all their music income combined. Spotify's wording is also royalties "generated". That is money paid to rights holders, and how much an artist keeps depends on their deal. Neither source gives a full distribution of earnings across everyone who uploads music, so this is the honest limit of what anyone can say.

How are artists reacting?

The evidence we could check is thin: two posts on X, neither from a well-known account. One X user summed up the figures with a blunt "keep your day job" and said most artists couldn't afford promotion last year. Another account told artists they aren't failing: the maths is just brutal. The second take is closer to the data. When 64% of respondents work outside music, a day job is normal, not a sign that someone isn't trying hard enough.

What we think

Releasing music is a solved problem. Earning from it isn't, and the industry still sells the first as if it fixed the second. A few points the report suggests without saying outright:

The people who sell access to release earn whatever artists make. Ditto's pricing page lists distribution plans from $19 a year, and artists keep all their streaming income. That is a fair deal by industry standards. But a distributor gets paid every year whether or not the artist does. When three in four customers earn under $1,000, the fee is a real share of their music income. The same goes for promotion services and playlist-pitching tools sold to the same artists. Ditto deserves credit for publishing data that makes its own sector look uncomfortable. Still, a report like this is also a marketing asset, so read the "what would help" questions with that in mind.

Artists aren't asking for more uploads. Their top answers were discovery and royalty rates. Both are platform-level levers that no individual artist controls. The usual advice to release more often, post more and grind harder puts all the work on the artist. It also adds to a catalogue that platforms are already filtering: Spotify says it took more than 50 million "slop and spam" tracks out of recommendations this year.

Direct fan income is the biggest gap in the data. The report has no figure for direct-to-fan revenue. We think it should be the first thing Ditto measures next year. Money from fans who pay you directly (Bandcamp-style sales, memberships, shows you promote yourself) doesn't depend on per-stream rates or an algorithm. For an artist on $1,000 a year, even a few hundred paying fans would change the picture. Without data, though, that is a hypothesis, not a finding.

Who wins and who loses. Platforms and distributors gain from the volume of releases. Artists carry the cost, and the US figure (43% considered quitting, against 32% overall) suggests the pressure is sharpest there. Don't lecture artists about side hustles. Push platforms to publish full earnings distributions, push distributors to report what their median customer earns, and build income that doesn't run through the stream count.