Spotify has tried to explain that a song getting millions of streams is more common than people realize, that this does not entitle an artist to make a living off of their music.

The music industry is an ecosystem of creatives on a spectrum of commercial success. When that ecosystem is disrupted, mastering studios, management companies, and session musicians are put in danger. Mainstream superstardom is not an appropriate metric for what makes someone a professional musician.

To put this in perspective, Galaxie 500 had 8.5 million streams in 2020. For Spotify to say these numbers are not a critical milestone for a recording artist is disingenuous. And even artists like Galaxie 500 who are able to sustain those streaming numbers over the years are still not receiving tangible compensation from their recorded work. Moreover, the nature of the pro-rata model brings down the payouts every year as more and more artists split up the revenue. Daniel Ek has never addressed this dysfunction.

Some artists do well in streaming, but it is an exception to the rule. These payouts are split amongst an artist’s entire creative team, including bandmates, labels, and managers. Most recording artists are not able to be successful without a label, nor should they be expected to.

The Q&A section of Loud and Clear talks about how streaming has benefited the music industry as a whole. Here, Spotify is setting up a false dichotomy. No one is saying that streaming is inherently bad. like any technology, it must be equitable. In the section entitled, “Some of the Musical Voices of Spotify,” Spotify tries to show how smaller and emerging artists grow their fanbase through streaming. That exposure is indeed beneficial, but fame does not keep the lights on.

Spotify cites a study by the National Music Centre claiming that, under a user centric model, artists outside the top 10,000 would see on average, at most, only an additional few pounds per year. We do not expect all recording artists to make a living off of their work, but when an artist is generating a significant amount of revenue, more of it should go to them. User-centric would eliminate fraud and stop pitting artists against each other. The major label heads have said in the UK Streaming Inquiry that they would be willing to look into a user-centric model. These people own the vast majority of Spotify’s library, and are stakeholders in the company. Spotify complains that the switch would require “broad industry alignment,” but, as UMAW member Damon Krukowski has pointed out, “when they [Spotify] point the fingers at major labels, they’re pointing fingers across their own board room.”