Neglegible marginal impact. Nevermind that most of this manpower seems to be wasted on adtech and bullshit redesigns. Their service sure hasn't improved recently.

> resources

This was completely self-inflicted. They used to run a p2p network, they chose to shut that down. That's fine, but they can't blame that on their users.

> licensing

Spotify's licensing budget is a fixed percentage of their revenue. A user that doesn't bring in any revenue won't increase their licensing costs.

I guess artists could opt out if they thought their licensing slice was too small, but that's effectively career suicide. Just look at Prince.