Who are Spotify’s artists? I thought the artists contracted with record labels

It is pretty straightforward to get your music on Spotify and all the other streaming platforms. No record label needed. There are very inexpensive services that will do all the leg work for you, but it take approximately 230 streaming plays on spotify to earn a dollar.

How many plays should it take to earn a dollar? I don't know anything about the music industry.

A radio play is around 9.5 cents per play. Assuming there are no royalty splits, then that would be 11 plays to earn a dollar.

I think royalties of 1 to 3 cents per stream are completely reasonable. Subcent royalties are just platforms taking advantage of the content creators.

Which is why most artists see all the streaming platforms as merely a way to advertise for live shows and merch. That's the only way to really make money without hitting Taylor Swift levels of streams.

Going from your original numbers (which I didn’t check), a play current pays out just under half a cent (1/230), and you’d like Spotify to pay around 5 times that (avg 2c). Spotify distributes about 70% of revenue to rights holders so you’re asking Spotify to pay out ... 350% of revenue to rights holders?

Spotify could almost certainly be charging more, but it’s already incentivised to maximise revenue, and it has competitors, so it seems like it’s probably found the market value of a play?

From wikipedia: "Spotify pays royalties based on their "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service."

Regardless, Spotify is free to pay whatever they think is fair and artists are free to accept or reject that compensation as they will. But if you're an artist, Spotify (and the other streaming platforms, which mostly pay even less) are not going to be something that you can ever expect to be an income source.

For Spotify to pay 1/3 of radio stations, wouldn't that imply that only 3 people are listening to the radio station? I don't know what typical numbers are but that sounds... low.

A radio play is also tens of thousands of listeners. Compared to that, Spotify pays many orders of magnitude more than radio.

Fair enough.

How many people on average hear a single radio play? Without that number this isn’t a reasonable comparison point.

Assuming your number of 1 cent/stream, and considering that 7$ out of the 10$ subscription pays for the music, that gives an average of 23 streams/day for a subscriber.

That's about 80 minutes of music per day, down to 50 minutes or less if you're sharing the subscription.

And somehow terrestrial radio stations, which have no subscription base manage to make it work.

As I said in the comment above, artists are free to NOT put their music on Spotify if they don't think it's a good deal, but regardless streaming services are only commercials for artists. Spotify is far from the worst offender. :-)

But on radio, 1 play is listened to by many people. That's equivalent to many streams.

Fair enough

The people who make the music. Some don't have record labels, so it would be weird to not just talk about the artists.

I thought Spotify didn’t contract directly with any artists?

They don't

Many people here are against copyright and thus by fault, royalties (of other peoples work, not their own), but as a hypothetical, I wonder the same.

It appears the major labels sold their catalogues for a pittance and streaming platforms are 'making hay'. We could have been streaming The Beatles on an app called EMIMusic had they not been so slow on the uptake of the internet.

As soon as all music is finally only made by people who have no monetary concerns, the end of revolutions will also be nigh.