I mean small relative to big artists, not small in absolute numbers. If you have less than 1k streams you probably have less than 50 listeners which is basically nothing.

A (relatively) small audience would be made up of tens of thousands of listeners generating millions of streams. There are many, many independent artists that fall into this group.

According to Spotify's data report site[0], there were 17,800 artists grossing over $50k from Spotify (7,800 being between 50k and 100k), out of a denominator of ~8 million, or 200k if you use Spotify's estimate of “professional or professionally aspiring”.

I don't know much at all about the music industry, so I don't really have a conclusion from those data, but that seems low. It also does put a (not insignificant) number on the independents accomplishing what you describe.

0. https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/