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The idea that it's "too much" to expect all of the music for $10 is strange because there are legal ways to do that right now. I can just go on YouTube, turn an ad blocker on, and there we go. It's not curated, there's no playlist, there's no buffering on my phone when I go underground, the general experience is worse, etc. But that's literally free. Without the ad blocker, it's ad supported, okay, so it's like default spotify without paying. But it's there and it has been for like, ten years now. In fact I find that YT has loads of stuff that's not on Spotify at all. If you're disappointed that it turns out that most people ended up not paying for music once they had the choice, fine. But like, the idea that it's somehow unsustainable is obviously wrong, and calling it unethical is pretty opinionated (how is it unethical for me to click on a Beatles video when they're all either dead or fantastically wealthy?) I've been considering cancelling Spotify for ages, I've been on and off. The only thing that keeps me using the platform is that it's more convenient - it's like buying a coffee at the motorway services instead of making one from a bag of coffee, a cafetiere, and a kettle in my car. I can do it, I just don't want to sometimes. |
You're probably on the wrong track when your example happens to involve people whose level of success / compensation is so wildly outlier that they're not even representative of the top 10% (not to mention established under an entirely different distribution order). Of course marginal dollars don't matter as much in that case, let alone marginal pennies.
But they do matter quite a bit at the scale where people are within striking distance (above or below) of the transition point between making a living at music and not making a living at it. That's where ethics of supporting people whose work you apparently value would matter most.
There, YouTube's economics are also pretty unethical (from what I've heard their payouts are about half of Spotify and maybe adblockers make it worse). About the only saving grace is that everyone knows it's an essentially free show; no one is under the illusion they've participated in some kind of economically artist-supporting transaction when they watch a YouTube video, so those who feel some obligation on that front know they still need to do it. Spotify sometimes presents itself or is forwarded as a solution / alternative to piracy, giving it the veneer of an artist-supporting transaction when the more frequent reality is that its fractional nature pushes the point at which audience engagement can support artists economically up farther.