[hedora]

I mostly listen to long-tail artists, so if I were to pick one at random, it would probably be in the 80-99.9th percentile group. (Assuming 80% of Spotify's catalog is spam -- that could be, but I don't use Spotify, and have never encountered spam any of their competitors).

This would pull some revenue away from the > 99.9th percentile artists, but that's OK with me.

I'm more worried that, even if we count jobs that are way below minimum wage, Spotify is only supporting 15K bands worldwide. That rounds to zero when compared to their listener base and their revenue.

Anyway, I pay more than just a streaming subscription annually, but I went with an estimate of what's going into just Spotify for my calculations. I'm not convinced there'd be much societal impact (in terms of artists not being paid) if they disappeared tomorrow.

[pcthrowaway]

Then you're probably the rare exception who would likely benefit independent artists more by just randomly picking a few every year.

If everyone just pirated and picked a few musicians to support directly every year, the overwhelming majority of people would pick from the 16,000 in the 99.8th percentile on spotify, and the majority of the hundreds of thousands of artists in the 80th - 99.8th percentiles would see no income whatsoever from digital distribution.