> Spotify pays an average of $0.00318 per stream. That means it takes over 314 streams to make a single dollar on Spotify. [...] By contrast, Tidal pays $0.01284 per stream ($12,840 per million), while Apple Music pays between $0.008 and $0.01 (8-10,000 per million).

This is extremely misleading. Spotify has regional pricing; for streams from the US it's around $0.01/stream (not on my music computer right now so can't see the exact number). The "average" may be a lot lower just because Spotify is available in more countries with lower per-stream rates.

> AI tracks falsely attributed to deceased artists like Blaze Foley—a country singer who died in 1989—were found on their official Spotify pages, which raises a ton of questions about how these are curated.

I hate this too and I wish Spotify would do more about it, but this is a common nefarious tactic by musicians, not by Spotify. The idea is that you upload a song with multiple artists credits including yourself + some more popular musicians. Preferably famous enough to get streams but not famous enough to get instantly noticed. Unsuspecting listeners will get your track in their Release Radar, Discover Weekly etc feeds because they're following the more popular artist. You collect the stream revenue.

People who do this should be insta-banned from Spotify, for sure, but this isn't Spotify doing anything malicious.

> In response, bands that I have never fucking heard of like Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu have announced they are removing their music from Spotify

I realize it's a metal blog but c'mon, if you're a music blogger you can take the five seconds to search (or ask an LLM...) to find out that Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu are extremely popular indie darlings, and not sub-100 follower Soundcloud artists.

I suspect that in truth, he did look them up, but wanted to shit on non-metal music subtly.