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That percentage doesn’t really explain anything. What if Apple has more revenue? What if Apple users stream less, so royalty costs per subscription are lower? In both cases the AM payout could be fairer for artists and the percentage could still be lower.

The article you cite actually claims the latter is true, so it seems looking at just that statistic is misleading.

Dang that sucks.

Man, I really, really hate this situation.

No, they misread.

Did you even read what you posted ? "Its average per-stream payout rate is lower"

That comes down to Spotify being mostly ad supported users and Apple being all paid. If Spotify got rid of their free tier their 60-70% rev share would be more than Apple's 50%. But then the number of streams would go down by 50-60%, counterintuitively the total payout would only go down like 10-15% tho.