Spotify managed to make musicians abismimal returns, why would it work any differently for podcasts?
The best case to expect is an average Spotify user listens to about 500 songs a month (25 hours) and has an ARPU of about $5 (https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/31/spotify-108-million/). There cannot possibly be more than $0.01 (1c) per play available to pay the artists. Spotify paying out 37% of that actually looks pretty good.
That's as high as the users will go, it seems; the equilibrium point against piracy or other music services.
And who buys albums nowadays? I made some digital download purchases, but now they don't make much sense.
Smaller artists get paid less on Spotify but bigger artists get paid more (not sure about the details)
Per play, yes, not in total. But they compensate by getting artists a lot more plays than others.
I think that's very subjective. Spotify pays musicians the equivalent of what a user would actually pay the musician, which is basically nothing. We are to blame. As OP said:
> Our unwillingness to support content creators is what ruins things and puts everything behind an explicit paywall.
That's 100% true with most users. It has to be a very small % of users that will actually go out and purchase music that doesn't exist on Spotify for free/apart of their subscription. At the end of the day, the users just don't want to support content creators. Spotify isn't to blame for that.
There needs to be some reason for podcasts to move from where they are currently to Spotify. That reason is generally more listeners, more money or both.