[hn_throwaway_99]

I think there are 2 very important things missing from your analysis:

1. I'm not sure if Spotify still does this, but I think it does, but a couple years ago there was a big kerfuffle over how Spotify allocates its revenue. The way it works now is that only huge artists make anything, because given the power law distribution of music, what Spotify does is take the number of streams for an particular song and divides them by the total number of streams, and then uses this to proportion total revenue accordingly. What smaller artists wanted was division of revenue by individual subscriber. That is, say I pay $10/Mo for Spotify, but I only listened to 10 songs that month, all from the same artist. Under a "divide individual subscriptions" model, that artist would have received the full amount (i.e. approximately $7) of that user's subscription revenue (obviously depending on who has the rights to the song). But the way Spotify does it (again, not sure if this has changed), since that user listens to much less that the average user, when you pool everything together, that obscure artist makes a lot less.

2. The other issue is that Spotify has been using their power to force artists to accept their music being played for free in the first place. Taylor Swift famously removed all her music from Spotify years ago because Spotify wasn't willing to only let her music be played to paid subscribers (and not free users). Few other artists had the power to do this, both because they're teeny compared to Taylor Swift, and because Swift (very smartly obviously) controlled much more of her music rights than most artists.