Not to artists, to labels. Labels are massive companies, and everyone there needs to be paid from stream money.

Labels own the copyright to the recordings that Spotify is streaming.

And yet they are not artists.

And is it Spotify’s fault that some artists use labels? Spotify does allow artists to self publish and not use labels.

Your argument was built upon the premise that Spotify pays 70% to artists. You were show to be wrong and now appear to be trying to move the goalposts.

It pays artists that don’t use labels 70%. Saying Spotify doesn’t pay artists is rooted in ignorance because most major artists use labels and don’t own the rights to the recordings.

The amount of artists who aren’t on Labels and will still get paid under Spotify’s new rules is surprisingly small. It appears to be possibly be under 30%. So I do find it disingenuous to pretend like these artists are making a living off of Spotify royalties.

Here is example of how much labels music are in the big playlists several years ago. I can’t find anything from last year though. But we do know that payments are about to get a lot worse for smaller artists.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2022/05/major-labels-control...

There are plenty of unsigned artists being paid directly by spotify. It makes no sense to complain that spotify is paying labels when the artists are the ones that signed up for that deal.

And artist could choose not to use labels, if they figured they would make more money that way.

So the critique should be aimed at labels, not Spotify.

Apple lets developers keep 70% of their revenue. Should developers just jack up their subscription rates?

Or are artists less deserving of that 30% than developers?

What should the platform that has to provide the bandwidth, apps for phones, cars, smart devices(echo), tracking snd paying out the artist earnings, etc have a right to? They are losing money with 30% and no streamer has made money.

There are products that compete with spotify. The app store has none.

> Or should they just jack up their subscription rates?

Why do you have to make that sound so dismissive? Is it that bad to let people pay a pittance for what they use?

People won't pay more, or they'd already charge more. Especially when it's trivial to pirate. The only reason people started paying for music after about 20 years of rampant piracy is that streaming came along and offered a better user experience than loading up your phone or MP3 player with files that you had to download and organize yourself. It's easier to pay $10/mo than deal with that. But if the price goes much higher, people will either find technical solutions that make piracy easier (e.g. sonarr and better media apps) or they'll stick with free tiers and put up with ads.

We could always go back to the time before streamers where everyone just illegally downloaded their music.