Which sounds a bit weird to me. How many people used to spend more than $10 every month on LP or CD records. Probably many enthusiasts, but the average customer? Not a chance.
Yet artists say they get paid a lot less. The money must go somewhere.
With 282 million citizens at the time, that means every US citizen spent $3.95/month on CDs. Adjusted for inflation it's $7.56.
I don't have any stats for this, but my first guess would be way more paid artists (before the internet, how many people could even hope to make money off music? Physical distribution vs digital distribution is a huge barrier).
When I buy a CD, I have a physical good that is displayed on my shelf and it's going to stay with me for years, and which I can possibly re-sell.
$10 for Spotify gives me a month of listening to music. But after that is over, all I got is another $10 payment for the next month.
For years there's been a conflict broadly defined as "streaming rates paid to artists are irrationally low" vs. "streaming services aren't making money as it is"; the problem is that those aren't mutually exclusive positions. They can both be true at the same time.
At least to me, this suggests that the real problem is that $8–10 a month for ad-free streams was too low a price point to set. If Spotify's pricing structure had been something more like Hulu's -- no free tier at all, $6/month with ads and $12/month without -- they'd have easily been able to meet that penny-per-stream pay rate. (Tidal beats that pay rate, but I suspect that's by virtue of charging $20/month for "hi-fi" streams.) But, at this point they've set consumer expectations: streaming music services cost $10 per month. Changing that would be pretty difficult.