Spotify is complicated because the big record companies are also big shareholders. They have a conflict of interest.

Also 70% doesn't mean anything without actual numbers. If they lowered their subscription to $1 / month and gave 80% to rights holders it wouldn't be an improvement.

I'd be more interested if they reported how many plays per month it takes to earn as much as you would in a minimum wage job.

Edit: I was curious about the minimum wage question so I looked it up.

Assuming $15 / hour for minimum wage it would take 750,000 streams on Spotify and 430,000 streams on Apple Music to earn the same in a month as you would working a minimum wage job.

https://soundcharts.com/blog/music-streaming-rates-payouts

My understanding is that rights holders are paid by the percentage of all plays, not per play.

Deezer is trying to fix this, but it requires the major labels to agree to the change. Deezer's user-centric payment system would apportion royalties based on an individual customer's play percentage instead of the total customer base's percentage. So if you only listen to 5 artists, all of your subscription's royalties would go to those 5 artists.

More info on UCPS at https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/deezer-launches-initia... and https://www.deezer.com/ucps

70% of an apple purchase goes to the app developer. That's not ripping off developers.

Apple doesn’t charge itself a 30% fee when it competes with other developers for the same paying users.

And you dont charge yourself what the lawn companies charge you to cut your yard. I don't really get your point.

Your example is faulty. No one pays you to cut your own lawn.

People pay Apple to listen to Apple Music.

People pay Apple to watch TV+.

Other competitors have to pay 30% for every customer before they can even compete with their own product.

That’s more representative of how the market has imploded.

There were 900M CDs sold in the US in 2000. This year that number will be less than 25M

Imploded or transformed?

Music consumption hasn't gone down. Consumption of physical media that I can't slip in my pocket has.

Spending on music is vastly down.

The RIAA publishes numbers - https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Inflation adjusted we are down by over half from the peak.

Subscription revenue is less that 30% of peak CD revenue.

Wouldn't that be the record companies though? I have heard Kanye is trying to get more money for artists but not really sure. I am puzzled why blockchain+streaming for music hasn't taken off. Artists would maintain rights and profits from what I can tell

Traditionally payment & accounting has never been a problem in the music business, so I think blockchain would not really help. The underlying economics is what has changed dramatically. Distribution is close to free, but unlike the ~ $1 an artist might have seen out of a CD sale (before discounting for costs & advances) they now see sub-cents on a single track. You used to pay $15-20 for an entire album to get 2 or 3 good songs; now you only stream everybody's top tracks and pay less than that a month. So the artist gets a couple of pennies for the period when they are hot, then nothing.

Why would you put blockchain in this?

For micropayments per stream, presumably.

Blockchain is not suitable for micropayments. The computing resource requirements are many orders of magnitude too high.

A proof of work blockchain isn't suitable, but proof of work is one of many ways to reach distributed consensus.