That still sounds like a bad model for paying artists. If I sign up for Spotify and only listen to a few artists I'm fond of, those artists get next to nothing of my subscription fees. Instead I'm subsidizing the payouts to artists like Drake. Who I have nothing against, I'm just not listening to his work.

Exactly. People complain how little it pays but forget that they're just a drop in the stream of how much people are listening to.

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.

Do they actually pay per listen? I thought they used one of those bullshit, gameable-by-default algorithms of your song streamed relative to all music streamed on the platform.

And a third Tidal and a fraction of album sales. They are the worst-paying of the major music streaming services.

But significantly less than CD sales used to.