I fully get this, but I think the reality is more complicated.

Prior to Spotify, if you didn't have money you were pirating. Whilst there was something magical about knowing every drumfill on an album as a 15 year old because you could only afford to buy one or two a month, Spotify absolutely opened up the world. As a listener you could discover without cost or piracy. Being a musician (that made money) was never easy, but now it could be done without a label and with some hustle.

Aside from a few 'Tidal only' exclusives, the music industry has mostly avoided the fractured model the TV and Film industry suffers from. Pretty much every record ends up on pretty much every service (as opposed to me needing to subscribe to Netflix, Prime and Disney).

It pains me to think we'll end up (back) in a world where you need 3 subscriptions (or worse) piracy. And sure, people could go back to buying every record, but they won't.

Anyway. Complicated.

And FWIW, I agree, Spotify does itself zero favours and could do soooo much better for artists.

I've recently discovered there's a lot of stuff like covers even by relatively mainstream artists that you can get from YouTube Music but not on the other platforms like Spotify.

What could they do? They have a pot of all the money they make, 70% gets paid out to artists, 30% goes to Spotify. Same as Tidal, more than Apple Music. Any plan will involve shuffling around the same pot of money and the last time they tried to "concentrate" the money by dropping songs with less than 1000 plays everyone hated it.

Zooming out to all the services, how the royalty model currently works out is that's all the money there is in streaming. And divided up it's pennies. All that can be reasonably done is shift how we allocate it. And large rightsholders who have the most leverage love the current system where the allocation is by total plays globally across the service.