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Well, it is definitely in Spotify's interest to keep as many quality artists as possible on Spotify, and that probably involves paying them.

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I think you missed my point, obviously you should get paid for your monthly listens but it's not Spotify's responsibility to drive listeners to your music. You are obviously free to market and promote as much as you can, hitching your success or failure to Spotify including you in Discover seems like a sure way to fail to make a living.

I heard a rumour once that artists did not actually need to eat.

/s

Imagine saying this about a CD store a few decades ago. It would be ridiculous to say that a store was responsible for promoting indie artist CDs. If you want to get listens or sales make good music, it's pretty simple.

On the other hand, money earned from streaming vs money earned from CD sales (especially a few decades ago) is completely incomparable.

If selling CDs through a store could earn you (using simple but realistic numbers here) $100k per year, and Spotify streams to the same audience size earn $1k per year, it’s not unreasonable to expect that Spotify should add a hell of a lot more value on its end, perhaps in the form of driving listeners to artists — especially if Spotify possesses the means to.

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