Spotify pays out 70% of revenue they receive to owners of the music, BandCamp 75%, SoundCloud 80%. Could be slightly better, but it's not outrageous.
The real problems for artists are:
a) they are not the owners of the music, their record label takes most of it, and the rest is split between the artists, songwriters, producers, etc.
b) bad deals with (but good for) the customers - ~10/month for unlimited music too good value
Also, they’re not really a streaming service: you can preview a lot of music on the platform, but it’s primarily about buying music. It’s not really a good comparison to Spotify at all.
But it is way overpriced compared to Apple Music (definitely) and Tidal (arguably).
Not having lossless audio and paying artists less is ridiculous.
60% of my listening is through a pair of AirPods over Bluetooth, 30% on a Sonos system and 10% using semi decent wired headphones. Lossless isn’t something that is a differentiator for me.
I have some music on both Spotify and Apple Music - the reality is that even with a few thousand streams per month we haven’t even made back the cost of 2 hours of rehearsal space. The reality is that for artists making a living off this, the problem isn’t the difference between 75 and 80% that Spotify holds onto, it’s the fact that the artist only sees 15-20% of what’s left over.
The problem with Netflix is the same as console exclusives in video games - fragmenting the ecosystem means I look at the service for the content it has vs the other services. But with Spotify it fills that niche entirely.
Apple Music, Tidal etc have almost identical libraries.
Catalog size stopped being a differentiator years ago.