This is so stupid. Spotify pays out over 50% of its revenue to small artists, at a much higher rate than radio did. They dont have much pricing power or margin either.
Artists are underpaid because subscription fees are too low to provide adequate payouts. There just isn't enough money to go around. Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require.
No, it sounds like many people want artists to get better payouts, but not if it means they have to pay more, which really isn't the same thing.
If more than 50% of what listeners end up paying for the subscription goes to the artists, I guess they'd prefer that, rather than the money going elsewhere.
I find Spotify relatively expensive in comparison to say Netflix. It takes far more capital to record a movie then it takes to record music. The same is true for storage and streaming. Yet, Netflix subscriptions are much cheaper than Spotify and Netflix is far more profitable. Spotify's business model is simply broken.
Spotify needs to pay ~70% of the revenue as royalties, Netflix started their own productions to not have to disburse in royalties (and the quality suffered).
Netflix was the first ever streaming service I canceled the subscription without feeling I had lost anything, after more than 10 years as a paying subscriber their quality declined so much I didn't care about it at all. It's been 3 years and I never thought about subscribing again.
