YOU CAN MAKE BIG BUCKS ON SPOTIFY—JUST ASK MARK RONSON

How big is Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk”? Big enough to generate around $100k a week on Spotify alone. Tim Ingham (whose profile of Nick Raphael is a must-read) did the computation for a story on his great new site Music Business Worldwide.

The track, which has hit #1 in more than 20 countries, has been played a total of 125.9m times, according to Spotify’s figures. Using Spotify’s own rough estimate of its payment to rights holders—$0.007 per-play—that means the song has earned around $880k in total. As Ingham’s chart indicates, “Uptown” Funk has become steadily more popular on the service in every week, culminating in 15.4m plays in the last week of January.

Again, using Spotify’s per-play average, that means the song is now earning around $100k each week globally on the service—a figure that will be shared among Ronson, Sony Music, his publisher Imagem and his co-writers, Jeff Bhasker, Bruno Mars and Philip Lawrence of The Smeezingtons.

“Uptown Funk” remains comfortably #1 on Spotify globally, but other tracks that are racking up a similarly high play counts include Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” and Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” which are both attracting around 13m streams a week.

As Ingham points out, major labels keep around 73% of payouts from Spotify, with artists taking 11% and songwriters/publishers being granted 16% between them, according to research from SNEP/Ernst & Young in France.