> Comments like this one are a real puzzler to me. Why does it matter that the higher royalty is not out of altruism? It’s money! Money doesn’t care. More money for artists is good. You can’t buy a cheeseburger with altruism.

All the money that streaming services pay out goes to copyright holders. Guess who the copyright holders are. If you say "artists", think again. For the absolute vast majority of music it's the Big Four/Three: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation

So, when the likes of Spotify pay 60-70% of their revenue to the record labels, and the artists get peanuts... Spotify (and Tidal, and Apple Music, and...) get blamed. Now this is a real puzzler.

Because if royalties are function of licensing volume, it makes no difference who you choose. If more people ditched Spotify for Apple Music, they’d start getting more favorable rates with record labels.

If you really wanted to help artists, it would make the most sense to use whichever service is cheapest and then donate the difference to artists. But, personally I’d just go with whoever provides the best user experience, which is none of them, so I basically haven’t listened to music aside from occasional YouTube chill beats for years.