How Much Do Creators Charge to Promote a Song? 2026 Rates
If you have a release coming and a few hundred dollars, here is the short version. Almost everything an independent artist can buy is priced per person, and most of those people cost between $1 and $300.
- One video from a creator using your song. On SpaceLoud, the median paid TikTok or Instagram Reel using an artist's song cost $10, across 6,061 posts in the year to October 2026. Across all niches, not just music, nearly 80% of brand-creator collaborations cost under $300, according to Collabstr's 2026 Influencer Marketing Report.
- One playlist curator review. €2 per curator on Groover, and roughly $0.78 to $4 per curator on SubmitHub, depending on the curator and how many credits you buy at once.
- A managed playlist campaign. Spotify campaigns start at $280 and average $450, per Playlist Push's help center, which carries a February 2026 byline.
- Spotify's own promo tools. Marquee and Showcase campaigns run from a $100 minimum, billed per click.
Every figure below names its source and its date. That matters more here than it normally would, because the most-repeated numbers in this niche are not survey results. Collabstr's influencer price calculator has a Music & Dance category and returns an average pulled from marketplace listings. It is a genuinely useful tool. It is also not a published dataset, and that distinction vanishes the moment its output gets pasted into somebody else's rate table.
Which leads to the thing worth saying up front: we could not find a single published dataset of what creators charge for a music placement specifically. The public averages come from general influencer marketplaces, from journalism, or from a single company's own price list. So we are publishing ours: every completed creator deal on SpaceLoud, a marketplace where artists pay creators to post with their songs. Our numbers come first, then the public benchmarks to compare them against.
What 6,061 paid posts on SpaceLoud actually cost
These are the prices artists actually paid, not listed rates or asking prices: 6,061 posts across 4,426 completed deals between 335 creators and 498 artists, from October 25, 2025 to October 19, 2026.
| Platform | Paid posts | Middle half paid | Median | Top 10% paid over |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | 3,837 | $8 to $20 | $10 | $30 |
| Instagram Reels | 1,531 | $6.25 to $20 | $10 | $32 |
| Instagram Stories | 327 | $5 to $15 | $10 | $27 |
| YouTube Shorts | 214 | $8 to $15 | $10 | $45 |
| YouTube | 123 | $6.50 to $15 | $10 | $24 |
56% of all paid posts cost $10 or less, 88% cost $25 or less, and fewer than 1% cost more than $100.
Follower count barely moves the price
| Creator's followers | TikTok median | Instagram Reels median |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10K | $10 | $10 |
| 10K to 50K | $10 | $8 |
| 50K to 100K | $10 | $10 |
| 100K to 500K | $11 | $18 |
| 500K and up | $19 | $50 |
On TikTok, a creator with half a million followers costs the median artist about twice what a creator with 5,000 does, not a hundred times as much. Instagram prices climb more steeply at the top. We grouped creators by their follower count today, not on the day of the deal.
What the views look like
We record view counts for posts made through SpaceLoud. For the 3,003 TikToks we have counts for:
| TikTok | |
|---|---|
| Median views per post | 1,322 |
| Middle half of posts | 437 to 5,349 views |
| Top 10% of posts | over 23,000 views |
| Posts over 100,000 views | 41 (1.4%) |
| Posts under 1,000 views | 1,178 (39%) |
| Median cost per 1,000 views | $7.58 |
| Total paid ÷ total views | $1.34 per 1,000 views |
The gap between those last two rows is the most useful thing in this post. A typical post costs about $7.58 per thousand views, but a few posts take off, and across all posts the average comes out at $1.34 per thousand. Creator promotion is a portfolio, not a purchase: most of the value comes from a few posts you cannot pick in advance, so ten $10 posts beat one $100 post.
A rough estimate to plan with, assuming each post performs independently at these rates: with 10 posts, the chance that at least one clears 23,000 views is about 65%. With 30 posts it is about 96%, and the chance that at least one passes 100,000 is about 34%. Treat those as a sense of the odds, not a promise. Songs differ, and creators who post your song together do not perform independently.
How to read these numbers
- One marketplace. SpaceLoud's creators skew toward smaller and international accounts, which pulls the median down. A US creator with a manager will quote more.
- Active creators count more. A creator who completed 50 deals appears 50 times, so the medians reflect where deals actually happen rather than what the average creator quotes.
- View counts are a snapshot. Counts are from the last time we checked each post, not lifetime totals. YouTube samples are too small to draw view conclusions from, so we left them out.
The rest of this post sets those numbers against everything else that is published.
What other sources say creators charge
Here is every published benchmark we could verify, with what each one actually measures.
| Figure | What it measures | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| $288 average per Instagram Reels post | All niches, one marketplace | Collabstr | Aug 2025 |
| $217 average per TikTok video | All niches, same marketplace | Collabstr | Aug 2025 |
| ~80% of collaborations under $300 | 21,000+ collaborations, all niches | Collabstr 2026 report | 2026 |
| $100 to $200 for smaller music influencers | TikTok song promos, reported speech | The Independent | Apr 2023 |
| "Upwards of $10,000" at the top end | Label and agency deals | The Independent | Apr 2023 |
Two things worth pulling out of that table.
The Reels premium is real, and it rarely shows up in music promotion pricing guides. Collabstr found Instagram Reels posts running about 32% above TikTok videos, $288 against $217, in data published in August 2025. If your budget is fixed and your song works on both, that spread is a live decision rather than a detail.
The $100 to $200 figure was the closest thing to a published music-specific number, and it is three years old. Our own median is a tenth of that, which says as much about who is selling as about the price. Music producer Jesse Cannon, who worked at Atlantic Records until 2020, told The Independent in April 2023 that "a lot of the smaller influencers are happy with $100 to $200," and that top-end deals ran "upwards of $10,000." He also called the market "the Wild West," which remains the most accurate two-word summary available. Treat those numbers as history, not as a price you can hold a creator to in 2026.
What playlist curators, bloggers and YouTubers charge
This is the part almost every competing page skips, and it is where prices are lowest and best documented, because the submission platforms publish their price lists.
| What you pay for | Price | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| One curator or music pro contacted on Groover | €2 (2 Grooviz at €1 each, tax included); €4 or €6 for "Top" contacts | Groover help center | Nov 2025 |
| Groover's own recommended campaign size | 50 to 100 contacts, so €100 to €200 | Groover help center | Nov 2025 |
| One curator on SubmitHub | 1 to 4 premium credits; credits cost $1 each, dropping to $0.78 in bulk | SubmitHub FAQ | Undated |
| A Playlist Push Spotify campaign | From $280, average $450, up to $1,000+ | Playlist Push help center | Feb 2026 |
Three notes on reading that table.
Blog, EP and album reviews are priced separately, and higher. Some outlets in SubmitHub's public curator directory list a marketplace section. When we checked in August 2026, the blog Stereofox listed EP reviews at 30 to 50 credits and album reviews at 50 to 80 credits, against 4 credits for a single track. At $1 a credit, that is $30 to $80 for one written review.
Prices move, including inside one company. Groover's February 2025 help article put its premium "Top Curator" tier at 4 Grooviz and under 3% of contacts. By November 2025 the same help center said 4 or 6 Grooviz and under 10%. Nine months, two different price lists. Anything you read about rates, including this page, has a shelf life.
On SpaceLoud, curators list a price per placement, and the median Spotify playlist price is $5. Since curators launched in March 2026, about 17% of the offers curators answered were accepted, and nearly every accepted offer ended with the song added to the playlist. Most offers were never answered at all, so expect to send several.
On the review platforms, you are buying a review, not a placement. Groover refunds your credits for any contact who does not reply inside seven days, and quotes a reply rate around 90%. A reply is not an add. SubmitHub publishes a running approval rate on its own site: 28% of submissions approved over the trailing month, when we looked in August 2026. If you would rather not pay for reviews at all, you can still pitch playlists directly for free, which costs time instead of money.
What the platforms themselves charge
Worth knowing before you pay anyone else, because these prices are fixed and public.
Spotify's Marquee and Showcase campaigns take a budget between $100 and $10,000, or the local-currency equivalent. The minimum rises to $250 if you book through Spotify's local representatives. Campaigns are priced per click, saves count as billable clicks, and a Marquee campaign runs for 10 days or until the budget is spent. Spotify does not date that support page, so check the numbers in Spotify for Artists before you plan around them.
Meta ads run on an auction rather than a price list, so there is no equivalent figure to quote. Our breakdown of running Meta ads as a musician covers how that spend tends to behave.
What actually moves the price
Follower count is the weakest predictor on this list, and the one most rate tables are built on. In our data, TikTok creators with 100K to 500K followers charged a median of $11, a dollar more than creators under 10K.
- Usage rights. Collabstr found that content usage rights can add up to 39% to a campaign's cost. If you want to run a creator's video as a paid ad, that is a different deal at a different price.
- Timing. Collabstr also reported seasonal demand spikes of 20% to 30%. Release week is not a cheap week.
- Engagement, not audience size. Collabstr's own pricing write-up makes the point directly: two creators with the same audience size can carry very different price tags, because brands now price on engagement and audience quality.
- Where the supply is. Playlist Push's curator program is only open to people living in North America and Europe, per its curator requirements page, updated March 2026. Limits on the supply side shape what you can buy and what it costs.
- Platform mix. TikTok-specific campaigns fell 48% on Collabstr's marketplace in its 2026 report while user-generated content campaigns grew 133%. That shift is about brands rather than music, but it is where creator attention and pricing pressure are moving.
What to budget: four worked examples
Rounded from the sourced figures above. The failure mode matters as much as the price.
$100. About ten creator posts at SpaceLoud's $10 median, or about 50 curator contacts on Groover at €2 each, or the minimum Spotify Marquee campaign. Pick one. If you pick creators, ten posts that each land at the median add up to roughly 13,000 views, with about a two-in-three chance that one of them passes 23,000. The failure mode is splitting $100 across all three and learning nothing from any of them.
$300. Enough for a real test: around thirty creator posts at the median, or a handful of larger creators, or roughly 100 Groover contacts, which is the campaign size Groover itself says works best. At thirty posts, the odds that one of them takes off start to work for you. The failure mode is a good song sent to badly matched creators.
$600. A managed playlist campaign at Playlist Push's $450 average plus one creator post, or four to six creator posts on their own. The failure mode is buying reviews and calling it promotion. At the 28% approval rate SubmitHub publishes, most of what you paid for is feedback, and feedback is not a placement.
$1,500 and up. Several channels at once, which is the point where you need a plan rather than a shopping list. Our ranking of which channels to spend on first is the place to start, and how to approach creators covers the pitch itself. The failure mode here is paying for reach into an audience that was never going to save your song.
None of these tiers buys a guaranteed outcome. Playlist Push says it plainly in its own help center: curators are "neither required nor incentivized" to add songs, and placements are not guaranteed. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you something else.
If you're a creator or curator, here's how to set your rate
The same numbers, read from the other end of the deal.
Start from what the platforms pay, then price above it. Playlist Push pays curators $1.25 to $15 per song review, set by a Reputation Score built on playlist listeners and platform activity, per its curator help article from October 2024. Groover pays €1 for each piece of feedback of at least 15 words and keeps €1 of the €2 the artist paid, which its February 2025 help article states outright. On SpaceLoud, curators set their own price per placement, typically $2 to $5. Those are floors, not ceilings, because they are volume rates for inbound submissions.
Read the fine print on advertised maximums. Playlist Push's help center notes that a curator only earns their maximum fee when a song targets every one of their playlists. The number in the marketing copy is rarely the number in the payout.
Price on views, not followers. Quote from the median view count of your last ten videos rather than your follower total. It is the figure a buyer can verify, and the one that survives an algorithm change.
Charge separately for the extras. Usage rights, exclusivity windows, a rush turnaround, a specific caption, a specific section of the song. Collabstr's 39% usage-rights premium is a reasonable anchor for the first of those.
The entry bar is real, and it is a reason your rate is worth defending. Playlist Push requires at least 1,000 organic followers per playlist, at least 30 active monthly listeners, and at least 1% active monthly listeners, with an outright ban on bought or follow-gated growth. For the earnings side of curation, including what the platforms pay across the board, see what curators earn on the other side of this transaction.
Rates that should worry you
Three patterns, in rough order of how much money they waste.
Guaranteed placements or guaranteed streams. Reviews can be guaranteed. Outcomes cannot. Groover guarantees a reply or your credits back. Playlist Push guarantees reviews and states openly that placements are not guaranteed. When a service guarantees adds instead, it either controls the playlists it is adding you to or those playlists are not real.
Prices quoted in views. "$5 for 10,000 views" is not a rate. It is a promise about something the seller does not control. Real rates are per post, per review, or per click.
A success rate that looks too clean. SubmitHub publishes a 28% trailing-month approval rate on its own site. Playlist Push does not publish one at all, and tells artists placements are not guaranteed. Measure any pitch against those two facts. Playlist Push's requirements page also bans bought followers, follow-gated growth and bot listening activity across five separate clauses, and a company does not write five clauses about a problem it never sees.
What both sides owe the audience
If you pay a creator to post your song, that post is advertising, and US law treats it as advertising.
The FTC's Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers says a "material connection" has to be obvious in the post itself, and that includes being paid or given anything of value. The disclosure belongs with the endorsement, not on a profile page or behind a "more" link. In a video it has to be in the video, not only in the description. Vague tags like "sp" or "collab" do not count. The FTC puts the duty on the endorser and tells endorsers not to rely on anyone else to do it for them.
This is not theoretical. In July 2026, NPR interviewed five music influencers who said they regularly accept payment to post about songs without disclosing it. One creator with more than 80,000 TikTok followers described working with a manager to set separate rates for undisclosed song promos and for posts labeled as ads. NPR did not publish those rates, and nobody has quantified how much of the music promotion you scroll past is paid for.
You cannot make the disclosure on a creator's behalf. You can ask for it in writing before you pay.
The numbers nobody publishes
Naming the gaps is more useful than filling them with guesses.
Before this post, there was no published music-specific creator rate dataset, and ours covers one marketplace for one year. Label and agency seeding rates exist only as anecdote, most of it years old. Nobody has measured how much promotion goes undisclosed, or independently audited how creator views convert into streams and saves. Blog and YouTube review pricing is mostly private rate cards. And apart from Groover's €1 of every €2, no platform publishes what it keeps against what it pays out.
If a page hands you a confident number for any of those, ask where it came from.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to promote a song on TikTok? A single creator video is the unit of cost. On SpaceLoud, the median paid TikTok using an artist's song cost $10 across 3,837 posts in the year to October 2026, and nine in ten cost $30 or less. Collabstr's all-niche average is $217 per TikTok video, published August 2025.
Is $100 enough to promote a song? It buys one real test. On SpaceLoud that is about ten creator posts at the $10 median. Elsewhere it is roughly 50 curator contacts on Groover, or the minimum $100 Spotify Marquee campaign. Split three ways, it teaches you nothing.
How much do playlist curators charge? On submission platforms, roughly $1 to $6 per curator to reach them. On a managed campaign, Playlist Push starts at $280 with a $450 average as of February 2026. You are paying for a review either way.
Do creators charge more to promote music than other content? In our data they charge less. The median music post on SpaceLoud was $10, while Collabstr's all-niche averages run $217 for a TikTok and $288 for a Reel. Part of that gap is who sells on each marketplace, so it is not a clean comparison, but nothing we have seen suggests a music premium.
What should I charge to promote a song? Start above the platform volume rates of roughly $1.25 to $15 per review, price video work from your median recent views rather than your follower count, and charge separately for usage rights, exclusivity and rush turnarounds.
The one thing to take from this
The going rate for a creator post using your song is closer to $10 than $300, and its views are a lottery that rewards many small bets over one large one. The reason artists overpay is rarely the rate itself. It is buying reach they cannot verify from a seller who will not say where their prices came from.
So ask. If the answer is a calculator, or another promotion company's blog post, you have learned something useful about the quote.