Because that's basically what you are asking for. There are millions of artists, and the number increases daily. Unless you charge more per user the pie is just getting split between more people. What you say is exactly the same as people were saying with every other medium. I have £10 to spend on entertainment this month, perhaps I'll buy your album, perhaps not, and now you see £0 from me instead of a bit.
Lets say I pay $10 for spotify premium and listen to nothing else on spotify except my favorite {indie band}. If spotify is paying out 70% to artists, both me and surely the {indie band} would prefer that my $7 (after spotify takes $3) go directly to the {indie band}. This would be fair, as I would know that listening to my favorite artists directly supports them (also nice incentive to buy spotify premium).
What spotify is doing instead (AFAIK), is basically taking the $7 and giving $6.99999999 to {top artist on spotify} because {top artist on spotify} has 100 millions of streams and listeners and giving $0.000000001 to {indie band} because it has maybe 1-3 listeners and 10 streams.
But wait, it's even worse after recent spotify changes, because now they can just go ahead and give {top artist on spotify} the whole $7 and give the {indie band} absolutely nothing if it doesn't hit the 1000 listens for a song threshold.
That's not fair because if you are pooling everything together and then going solely based on percentages of listen counts, its easy to game the system with bot farm listeners. [1]
I understand this likely won't change, because if spotify doesn't bend over backwards to please the big labels of top artists with these obviously skewed systems where big labels get everything and small artists get nothing, the big labels would just pull their catalogue out of spotify and kill it.
If not, why is the EU singling out Spotify?
But it's not going to make the slightest difference.
This is exactly what everyone whinged about in the 80/90's when no one made money on album sales but they made money touring and selling teeshirts.
There was never any money in albums for artists, and to use Beyonce as the example since you brought her up
https://parade.com/1138672/jessicasager/beyonce-net-worth/
> Beyoncé's estimated net worth in 2023 is $540 million.
> In 2019, The London Evening Standard estimated Bey's earnings from album sales to be about $13 million.
She has shifted 100's of millions of units, one of the most successful artists, and yet her earnings over multiple decades work out to single digit percentage of her actual worth.
She makes more from a single concert than her total album sales.
She makes more from a single clothing run than she does from her total music sales.
Musicians have a completely warped view of how other musicians make their money.
I just stated what is. Per stream the small guy gets less than the big guy. If anything the question here is why a big act gets more per stream than a small act – and what effect this ultimately has for the art that is created. There is many ways of slicing the cake without making the cake bigger. The biggest actor in the streaming business saying small acts can suck it is a statement, sure. But unless you want only corporate-created music you should remember that all artists start small and rooting for the big guy gives you nothing.
For small bands the whole thing means they have to rely more on merch, gigs and fans that actually buy things – you do streaming because it is convenient for people and you often cannot afford not not being visible on those platforms, not because it gives you any meaningful revenue.
Society doesn't owe me or my band shit, neither does Spotify. But they are not the good guy here.
More users (with the same usage) would result in a bigger pie with the same proportional splits.
