From Digital Audio Insider:
In terms of subscribers and market share, Beats Music (acby ApBeats by Apple as part of its purchase of Beats in May of last year) is way behind Spotify. But there’s one area where Beats Music appears to be ahead — the per-stream payout to artists/labels.
The first payouts from Beats Music just appeared in my CD Baby account. After adjusting for CD Baby’s commission, for December 2014, we received 1.801 cents per stream. For comparison, our per-stream payout from Spotify averages out to 0.428 cents for the past few years.
On its support site, Beats states that its payout rate will higher than that of other streaming services as, unlike Spotify, it has no free option:
We pay higher royalties than the other services because we are a paid subscription-only service (in other words, we have no free version of our service that we have to subsidize).
