I doubt streaming will be the future for small labels of classical music. Musicians and small/independent labels of pop music have been complaining that they cannot make money with Spotify streams. A report in 2015 said that Spotify on average paid per stream to rights holders lands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084. It is hard to imagine how many can labels like APR earn by allowing their albums to be streamed.
In my experience Spotify typically pays about $5 per 1k streams, ie $0.005 per stream.
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https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2579942?hl=en
āYouTube algorithmically determines the central topics in a video and then uses that information to develop collections of videos for any topic of interest. These channels donāt convey any editorial opinion on the part of YouTube.ā
Notice that for example in the Michael Zadora ātopicā, they also added a video that came from my channel. Of course I took the audio from the APR release. 
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Itās really a bit WTF. How many tracks does an average user stream per month? 100? Whatās the monthly subscription fee? $10? Unless those numbers are off the charts wrong each subscriber pays around $0.1 per stream, which in that case means a mere 5% of the earnings goes to the label.
Thereās also free Spotify, which I use occasionally, and Iāve not seen any drawbacks other than ads.
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There must be something wrong. If they pay $5 per 1k stream that means even a huge record company with 1M streams per month through spotify alone would earn $5k per month - from their entire catalogue! If that had been the economy behind it there wouldnāt be a single label on spotify, I mean itās the monthly fee for a single employee and nothing else.
A big record company will have a lot lot more than 1M streams.
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Yeah, in fact, as it handily came up on my twitter recently, I was able to verify that da TURKIZH DONGAH has had 13M streams this year.
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Oh. Through Spotify alone?
Yup.
Oh, and also - the $5/1k youāre talking about is what the MUSICIAN is paid, isnāt it? Not the whole record company?
No, I imagine thatās what the record company gets (and then what % of that goes to the artist will be something set out in the contract between them) Iām basing my stats on my memory of what rates I get for stuff I originally self-released.
I should also add that I suspect there is variance on streams pay rate depending on how much of the stream is completed.
Anyway I just logged into my pay (lol) records and another 5c earnt for 18 streams
Just about anything is more economically viable than classical music.
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Well, thatās 5 dollar per 1k clicks. So even if you listen to 5 seconds that still counts. And remember an album has multiple tracks, so that adds up. Still, even big labels complaining that they cannot make money from streaming, if you follow related news.
I think it needs to be at least 30s to count, and, as I said above, I think the amount paid depends on how much of the track is streamed.
I canāt get these numbers to add up at all though. If even da TURKISH DONGAH has >1M streams/month Spotify is way larger than I thought, and if a mere 5% of those earnings goes to actually buy the music they keep there they should have an enormous profit margin - as in 80-90%. There must be something we donāt know.
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And, as a rate benchmark, my last 500 digital sales reports combined, pasted from my account records:
Qty. Total:921.0 Earned Total:$7.37030268
Thatās what Iāve been paid, direct from Spotify.
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Extrapolating, thatās $104k for him and his record company to share in. Good money actually.
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Well, actually Spotify has not make any profit yet. It is still losing money every year, and a lot ā¦ This sounds rediculous, but as of 2017, only 5.5% of its users are premium users, which means, 95% of the people just listen to Spotify for free, without paying any money to the streaming serviceā¦