[unnamed76ri]

It is similar but different to what YouTube did (which also sucked).

How many musicians do you know of that only ever released one song? This isn’t about the streaming revenue for one song (though that is how Spotify tries to frame it). There are 1000s of artist who might have even been fairly successful at one point who have dozens or more songs in their back catalog that don’t have over 1000 streams per year. Add up the lost revenue from all of those together and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore.

Further, even approaching the argument from how much it means per song is granting Spotify a pass that this is in any way fair to artists. Why should the top 1% of artists take even more money while the struggling musician now gets nothing?

[hutzlibu]

Agreed in general.

"and it isn’t about just a couple bucks anymore."

And I want to add, that for quite some musicians, a couple of bucks can make the difference between being able to (partly) pay the rent, or not.

And those are usually the ones making interesting music. So I rather would like the trend reversed, less for the superstars, more for the unkown artists. But this is unlikely to change with these services.