Honest question: have you ever run a business? You're talking about setting up millions of accounts to pay them $.02 or $.20 or even $2.00. ACH payments cost an average of $.29/each https://gocardless.com/en-us/guides/ach/ach-fees-how-much-do...

You're dealing with a bunch of people who will try to rip you off, so you need to have anti-fraud protections. Then you need to be able to override the anti-fraud protections because Alex, Alex and Bob, Alex, Bob, and Curt, etc. are all legit performers who want the payments to go to one common bank account even though you'd like one act == one bank account. Etc.

SEPA seems to have no problem moving sub-euro amounts. I am not an entrepreneur, but I did send single euro amounts to my friends. Is it more difficult in USA?

My impression from Germany is that while private accounts often have no transaction fees (and are either completely free, or charge a flat monthly fee), with business accounts it's not that unusual to have transaction fees of up to ten or even twenty cent per transaction.

There is nothing to get away with. Hosting small/shitty bands is not a money making proposition for Spotify. Most bands will never make money on Spotify, in spite of Spotify enabling them to do so. They just suck. And I think it is so cool that anyone can suck and still have their music be ubiquitously accessible on the premiere music platform, without real hurdles and at no cost, in (roughly) the same way that any big artist can.

the Beatles sold their first thousand records, at one short time in history.. and there will never be another Beatles due to "long tail" modern distributions.. casual ill-will and indifference to new projects must not be confused with reasonable, or even legal contractual behaviors

Well I'd say that if Spotify were forced to, they'd instead just remove small bands from Spotify entirely.

It's the cost of doing business for the seller on the platform.

I'm not sure what's the problem here, to be honest. Alternativelly the platform could also charge withdrawal fees, making small withdrawals pointless.

Afaik this minimum withdrawal concept has been the standard way of doing business when reselling digital goods. See e.g. the aforementioned AdSense which has been set up this way for 20 years now. The same goes for Steam, once again you have to sell $100 worth of stuff to get paid.