Not really suggesting Spotify pays their artists well but surely YouTube is worse, right?
> Plays on YouTube Music will gain on average $0.008.
Although neither have sources. I imagine YouTube Premium plays match or beat Spotify on average.
Of course, for anything, if you block ads AND refuse to pay for the premium subscription, the artist makes $0 from your listening. Hopefully you can support them off-platform via merch or even purchasing their albums (e.g. iTunes which provides DRM-free versions), but then you're still not paying for the platform if you continue to use one with an ad blocker.
0: https://www.lalal.ai/blog/music-streaming-payouts-2023/
1: https://routenote.com/blog/how-much-music-streaming-services... Although this doesn't take into account
For monetized videos, where Youtube directly pays the channel owner, I've heard a few times now that they really don't pay anything when neither ads are successfully displayed or the viewer has Premium.