Not sure you remember where we were in 2012. We've come a long way from listeners not paying at all to $10B. The system is far from perfect but it is better than it was
I mean this should be criminal given their market power:
> their new policy to not pay artists who get less than 1000 streams on a track in a 12 month period
It may not be much to the individual artists (at most a few hundred $ a year in the extreme cases) but it's a nice chunk of change for Spotify to pocket.
> Tens of millions of them have been streamed between 1 and 1,000 times over the past year and, on average, those tracks generated $0.03 per month.
> Because labels and distributors require a minimum amount to withdraw (usually $2-$50 per withdrawal), and banks charge a fee for the transaction (usually $1-$20 per withdrawal), this money often doesn't reach the uploaders. And these small payments are often forgotten about.
> But in aggregate, these small disregarded payments have added up to $40 million per year, which could instead increase the payments to artists who are most dependent on streaming revenue.
> Spotify will not make additional money under this model. There is no change to the size of the music royalty pool being paid out to rights holders from Spotify; we will simply use the tens of millions of dollars annually to increase the payments to all eligible tracks, rather than spreading it out into $0.03 payments.
https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...