Apparently almost the entire musician-as-a-middle-class has been wiped out since the internet and streaming got big. Jaron Lanier talks about it fairy often: now, almost everything goes to the top earners.

This is a fair point. The one who is most vocal about Spotify does not make her living (entirely) from her music in the first place. It would be most accurate to say Spotify has had no effect.

> The actually popular artists make great money

Is this so? As I recall, Spotify pays tenths of a U.S. cent per stream. The gross payout for a million streams is a few thousand dollars.