What is MusiPie and what makes it different from other chart image generators?

Most music stat sites give you a ranking of your top artists or songs, but they don't show how this fits into the bigger picture of your listening habits. Are you a streaming junkie and hundreds of streams for an artist are just a drop in your vast musical ocean? Or do you rarely find time to listen, but when you do, you devote it to a handful of your most beloved artists?

MusiPie looks at your complete listening history and calculates each artist's share of your total streams. It is, to my knowledge, currently the only website that does that.

What does the slice for "Various Artists" mean?

If the percentage of an artist among your streams is smaller than 2%, the pie slice gets too narrow to readably label it, so all of these artists get summed up under "Various Artists".

What does the option "minimize Various Artists" do?

When you listen to a wide variety of artists, your pie might include a very large "Various Artists" slice, leaving little room for individual artists. This option tries to minimize the size of the "Various Artists" slice while scaling up the artist slices so that more of them can be displayed on the chart. This sacrifices the geometrically accurate proportions of the slices in relation to the whole circle, but the artist slices will still be accurately sized in relation to each other.

What do the QTY and AMT columns mean on my receipt?

QTY (quantity) is the number of times you have played a track (or, in artist mode, a track by that artist) in the selected timespan. AMT (amount) is the estimated amount of royaltgies in US dollars your streams have generated for the artist.

How do you calculate the royalties generated? Is this number really accurate?

Short answer: I use the average dollars generated per 1000 streams for the selected platform, as reported in the Duetti 2024 Music Economy Report. And no, it's not accurate, but it serves to illustrate a point.

Long answer: Contrary to popular belief, streaming platforms like Spotify don't pay a fixed amount per stream (the famed $0.003). The actual earnings an artist receives depend on a variety of factors like the location of the listeners, their subscription type (paid or ad-based), whether the artist is signed with a label (that will take its share) and which distribution service they use.

Most streaming platforms use a pro-rata system: all revenue from subscriptions and ads is pooled, and, after the platform takes its cut, the remaining amount is distributed proportionally based on total streams. This means your subscription fee primarily benefits the most-streamed artists with millions of streams rather than the ones you actually listen to.

Also, since the revenue pools are based on location and subscription tier, artists that have more listeners in regions with lower subscription fees will earn less per stream than artists that are popular in the most expensive markets. Finally, Spotify doesn't pay out royalties at all unless an artist has received at least 1000 streams a year from a minimum amount of unique listeners.

So what can I do to support my favourite small(er) artists if streaming pays so little?

• Buy their music - digital or physical. Check if they have a shop on their website or a page on Bandcamp and purchase from them directly.
• Get merch - shirts, posters, anything sold by them directly.
• Go to their live shows!
• Share their music - tell your friends, family, strangers, post about them on social media, request their music on the radio
• Follow them on social media and interact with their content - every like, comment and repost boosts visibility.

However, do keep streaming - even if the money generated isn't a lot, platforms like Spotify are still crucial for artists to get discovered by new listeners and the music industry.

Some characters on my receipt display as question marks, why?

The font used for the receipts doesn't support all scripts, so letters may display as ??? in some languages. I'm planning to implement a fallback font that can be used if you have characters from those languages in a future version.