Honesty has to be matched with clarity of insight to be worth much.
"Access to millions of potential listeners from around the world" was an advance that had arrived with internet itself and monetized with a number of retailed-recording models like iTunes or Amazon.
Or Pandora, if you like, but it's important to note it is a big mistake to think of Spotify and Pandora as the same thing. They're no more in the same category than FM radio is in the same category as a cabinet full of records. Pandora is radio evolved,and it's a discovery and promotional boon, I happily enjoy it and pay for it. Spotify is something else entirely -- it isn't primarily a radio station, it is a cloud replacement for record collections or the practice of owning recordings at all. Even calling it "streaming" almost kneecaps attempts to think about it productively because of how much that term is associated with broadcast.
Spotify's value-ad isn't audience reach. It isn't even algorithmic or social recommendation, both of which were done before it began to gnaw away at the industry. Spotify's contribution to both is marginal.
The big first-order benefit for the consumer is that it replaces retailed-recording revenue with very fractional per-stream revenue, and so it turns out you pay a lot less and the artist gets paid a lot less.
Trying to justify that with "yes, but their potential audience is so much bigger" ignores that artists have to do a LOT of increased volume to make up. 100 plays for every single or album they might have sold is a floor; in a retailed-recording model, someone who nets $.50 a song is already doing better than someone who gets 100 plays on Spotify (also, that's average and there are some rank-takes-all issues with how payments are distributed). And you still have the classic problem artists have always had -- how do you capture fickle and scarce attention?
And if you're relying on attention-volume, then that means niche music isn't going to be as much, so you need to pick a form that has the broadest possible appeal. And like the article says, you need to also focus on volume of material rather than polishing less frequent releases for a long time. And of course, marketing & promotion matters more than ever when a broad audience makes the economics work.
Do we like these incentives? Or do we just like paying less up front and not having to think about them?
As you say, let's be honest and clear-eyed about our answers.