Oh man that's really telling. I mean, it's so clearly obvious that Spotify is generally very bad for artists, and equally bad for labels-- unless you're an enormous artist getting millions of hours of streams, and even then I've read some horror stories about incredibly low payments.
I'm a part of a program called Kindle Unlimited via Amazon. I self publish all my books-- which, by the way, is the only real way you can make a living doing nothing but writing these days unless you're a mega famous author-- and they're almost all in the KU program. KU pays like this: every "page" a reader flips through, you get a certain amount of money, generally about .0045 of 1 cent. Over an entire 50k book that tends to be about $1.50, more or less.
To put it into perspective, I write very fast-- about 5,000 words per day. I can write a 50k long novel in 10 days-- and again, that's really fast. But for that much labor, and I do this full time by the way, for that labor I'll get paid about $1.50 per read, assuming people read it all the way through to the end, assuming Amazon can actually calculate pages read accurately, etc etc.
$1.50 for a book isn't great. But because Amazon owns the ebook marketplace, and being in Kindle Unlimited has certain advantages that I won't get into, it's still a good deal. There's no real alternative.
I can imagine musicians are making the same calculation. Spotify, Tidal, etc, they're the game right now. Streaming is the future, and as Spotify continues to grow its massive catalogue, it'll keep squeezing money from the creators. It's always been like that and it'll always be like that: these companies value the listeners/customers, and push the boundaries of what they can get away with in terms of creator royalties. Unfortunately, they're the only game in town, at least until alternatives comes up. Which is why I like Bandcamp and buying physical records when possible, I know that money goes to the people that deserve it.
Anyways, the internet has done a lot for creators, made it so much easier to be a professional author/musician/whatever, but there are so many trade offs, and I worry about what the future will be like as these huge streaming services continue to gain market share and control.
