Your math assumes those people only have one track on Spotify. I currently have 25 tracks on Spotify. Without advertising or promotion of any kind, I earned about $12 this year. The big problems are:
- New rules apply per song, so if ALL my songs got 999 streams, that would be $75 they wouldn't pay me--if ONE song hit the magic 1000 streams they would pay me $3 and I still wouldn't get the other $72
- They are still making money off my streams, they are just coming up with ways not to pay me for it while still claiming to be "artist focused"
- They claim the "small payments" usually don't get claimed anyway so they don't see the need to make them--this is ideologically "paying with exposure"
- By your logic, since $33,975 annual income is the federal poverty level, anyone making less than that should not complain about not getting paid at all--you can obviously insert any arbitrary amount here to support the "logic" of "that's not much so nothing at all is just as good"
I have no delusions about ever making a living off Spotify (or my extremely niche music in general), but the idea that a corporation should be able to monetize my work and not have to pay me anything for it is sort of distasteful
TemUmbridge