Adele earns £23,000 per word – beating Coldplay and Billie Eilish
With millions of people listening to their music, the most streamed artists are undoubtedly compensated heftily for their art. However, have you ever wondered how much these artists earn per word?
The experts at Americancasinoguide.com sought to find out how much one word sung by the top artists of 2022/23 is worth. To find that out, they analysed the top 10 most streamed songs on Spotify for each artist. The earnings per word were then calculated by dividing the Spotify revenues for their songs by the total number of words.
The full data set can be found here. We hope this data is of interest to you, if you wish to use it we kindly ask you credit appropriately with a link to https://www.americancasinoguide.com/.
Key findings:
- Adele earns nearly £23,082 per word!
- Adele’s highest earning song per word is ‘Someone like you’ – with each word valued at approximately £145,111.
- Coldplay and Billie Eilish rank in second and third place respectively.
The study reveals that the artist earning the most per word is none other than Adele – earning approximately £23,082 per word on average! The British singer is setting fire to the charts especially when it comes to her most streamed song out of her top 10 on Spotify, ‘Someone like you’. Released in 2011 and written as a goodbye note to the singer’s ex-boyfriend, this is Adele’s highest-earning song per word, with one word valued at approximately £145,111. Rumour has it this is one of the most financially beneficial breakups in history!
In second place we have Coldplay, the band earning approximately £17,802 per word on average. It’s easy to feel like they are living in paradise when their most streamed top 10 Spotify song ‘The Scientist’ is earning the band approximately £26,053 per word!
Billie Eilish might think she’s the bad guy, but she’s definitely not bad at making music, the artist earning approximately £14,172 per word on average. The song ‘Lovely’ where she collaborated with the singer Khalid was streamed over 2.2 million times on Spotify and it’s earning her £37,958 per word.
In fourth place is American singer and rapper Post Malone, who earns approximately £13,078 per word on average. In 2018 Post Malone collaborated with Swae Lee and released the song ‘Sunflower’ – the song earning the artist the most money according to the study, a whopping £27,928 per word.
The Canadian singer Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd comes in 5th place, the artist earning approximately £12,870 per word on average. When it comes to the singer’s most profitable song out of the top 10 found on his Spotify, the crown is taken by ‘Blinding Lights’, with one word from the song earning the artist approximately 43,086.
Methodology:
- American Casino Guide conducted this study to determine which of the top 50 highest-earning musicians make the most money per word. The analysis was conducted on the Top 10 most popular songs on Spotify for each artist because the number of streams is only published for those songs.
- The amount of money earned per song/album is difficult to find, but it is estimated that artists typically make between 0.003-0.005$ per stream from Spotify. Therefore, for this study, the earnings were calculated by multiplying the number of streams on Spotify by 0.004$ per stream, to give a conservative estimate of earnings for each of the top 10 songs.
- To calculate earnings per word, the lyrics for each song were collected from https://www.azlyrics.com/ and then cleaned to remove any artist cues and non-word characters. The number of words per song was counted, as well as the number of unique words per song to determine which artist has the widest vocabulary.
- The earnings per word were calculated by dividing the Spotify revenue (calculated in step 2) by the number of words for each song. A final summary was compiled by taking averages across all top 10 songs per artist, to find which artist on average earned the most per word.
- It is important to note that for Nicki Minaj, only the top 9 songs were calculated, as “Princess Diana” did not have the number of streams listed. Additionally, for songs with multiple artists, the number of words spoken per artist was not broken down. Therefore, it was calculated for all the words in the song by the artist/collaboration, not just by the artist itself.
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