That still sounds like a bad model for paying artists. If I sign up for Spotify and only listen to a few artists I'm fond of, those artists get next to nothing of my subscription fees. Instead I'm subsidizing the payouts to artists like Drake. Who I have nothing against, I'm just not listening to his work.

I'm pretty sure Spotify does pay artists a fraction of the subscription revenue, based on the number of listens relative to other artists.

That’s the problem. The subscription fees should go towards what one listens not average over all artists or some other kind of formula spotify came up with. This could be like micropayemnts and i think would change the dynamics quite a bit

I've always wondered why it isn't done like this. It doesn't seem like it would make a difference to Spotify. Is it the record label forcing the current model?

Exactly. People complain how little it pays but forget that they're just a drop in the stream of how much people are listening to.

The best case to expect is an average Spotify user listens to about 500 songs a month (25 hours) and has an ARPU of about $5 (https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/spotify-108-million/). There cannot possibly be more than $0.01 (1c) per play available to pay the artists. Spotify paying out 37% of that actually looks pretty good.

That's as high as the users will go, it seems; the equilibrium point against piracy or other music services.

Do they actually pay per listen? I thought they used one of those bullshit, gameable-by-default algorithms of your song streamed relative to all music streamed on the platform.

And a third Tidal and a fraction of album sales. They are the worst-paying of the major music streaming services.

Tidal, the one that was having financial troubles right?

And who buys albums nowadays? I made some digital download purchases, but now they don't make much sense.

Smaller artists get paid less on Spotify but bigger artists get paid more (not sure about the details)

I buy albums, at concerts and online, and I tend to prefer artists who can actually put together a whole album of music worth listening to. I have little patience for Spotify's exploitative pricing model.

> They are the worst-paying of the major music streaming services.

Per play, yes, not in total. But they compensate by getting artists a lot more plays than others.

But significantly less than CD sales used to.