> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.

My spotify wrapped says I listened for 50,000 minutes this year. Assuming 2 minutes per song, that's 25,000 streams. I paid them $110, aka $0.004/stream. Assuming I'm a typical user, they obviously could not afford to pay any more than that per stream.

I googled "spotify pay per listen" and the first result is a reddit comment saying "The average payout on Spotify is only $0.004 per stream." The google AI overview says "Spotify [..] pays artists a fraction of a cent, typically $0.003 to $0.005 per stream". So I'll assume it's something in that ballpark.

So it seems like Spotify's payouts are completely reasonable, given their pricing. Is my logic wrong somewhere?

That’s a fun math. I just checked mine: 96000 minutes. 2 minutes per song is way too generous as an assumption, for me everything seems to be > 3 minutes so ~20000 streams.

I’m paying for a family account (that’s around 250/year) and there are 5 people on it so my usage is 1/5th of that (50/year)

So that’s 0.0025€ per stream. I don’t think your assumption is unreasonable.

I suppose it depends on what the mean listening time is. I suspect the kind of person who comments on a discussion about music would listen more.