It really shouldn't be considered absurd, especially to people on hacker news. Many software projects are used by billions of devices (eg. linux, curl, openssl), but nobody is creating websites protesting how little github pays them. Just because people use your product, doesn't mean they're willing to pay money for it. If you can't make the economics work because nobody is willing to pay for your product, or there are tons of people lining up waiting to undercut you, blaming the platform is barking up the wrong tree.
I don’t think there’s a musical equivalent to that strategy.
Would it be that much though? Consider an artist with 20k unique regular listeners, which is successful territory but nowhere near big. If albums cost 3-5 bucks, an artist could make a good individual living releasing albums every 8 months or so, which is plenty of time to make em. Songs could then be maybe 30-50 cents. We’re never going back to such a model, but it wouldn’t be that expensive to fund artists.
also, of course it's a very frequently voiced "observation" that some percentage of a big amount of money... is a big amount itself, yet the marginal cost is - and you might not believe it, but - almost zero!
that's why people complain about taxes, bonuses, etc.
the usual complaints from small artists are usually about how the network effects are "biasing" the payout distribution toward big names. (ie. the fixed monthly subscription revenue split amongst all the artists weighted by plays.)