ah, you got to the main issue of the question. the problem is not different from before, and Spotify has just been used as a tool from the majors. if you read a comment below, I wrote that it’s true that Spotify pays their 70% to the artists… but they don’t tell how that money is redistributed. what we earn as independent is absolutely not the same of what a Warner or Sony artist earn. Spotify made under-the-table agreements with the majors in order to grab their catalogue and avoid getting shut off.

the majors saw spotify as a great tool to get themselves out of the hole they dug themselves into during the post 2000s, and kept doing their same shady kind of business.

so well spotted, you’re absolutely right.

sure thing, I’m not saying it’s not true. but we had two models to choose from: the bandcamp model, which is a marketplace where the artist can set their own price, the spotify model, where the distributor sets the price, and an in-between that was itunes, where the artist would suggest the price and the distributor could modify it.

for some reason we went to the nuclear solution, and chose the terrible spotify business model, where three companies make money while killing everybody else.

of course it’s a better deal, Youtube Music barely pays anything. it’s even worse than Spotify, and most of their streamings come for free, which is enraging to say the least.

anyways they have two paths: they either suck the costs in and increase the subscriptions (and lose customers in the meanwhile, so they’ll earn less in order to give more money to the small artists) or they cut the share they’re giving to the majors, which is the biggest percentage of the pie. but majors will simply boycott spotify and create their own platform, just as it happened with netflix.

of course a direct purchase from bandcamp, either an album or a shirt/merchandise is the best. avoid amazon at all costs. purchasing from itunes is decent. if you want to stream, pay for an account on tidal, it’s the one that pays best of all the streaming services. the very worst is spotify and right under spotify youtube/youtube music. it’s better if you just grab the album from piratebay at that point, since youtube is the only one making money.

It kinda does in a way. A Harvard study from 2004 showed that most artists actually get a profit from piracy (when they broke it down pretty much all but the 25% most popular artists sold more records and had more concert attendance).

Basically most legitimate music streaming services have ways of screwing over artists. Most services use a pro rata model that will screw over most artists.

As it stands for right now one of the biggest things hurting artists are the streaming services.

Things that help are services switching over to a fan centric model (SoundCloud is the only service I know of that has done this and I haven't actually seen too much info on how it's actually affected artists) and organizations like MAC and ARA that can affect policies and regulations in the music industry.

Media corporations won't solve that either. They will simply take your money and put it in their pockets while pretending that they care about artists.

Go see them to support them. That's the only way most bands make their money anyway. I'm friends with a member of a successful bluegrass band and they get just about zip from streaming and just about all their money from merch and ticket sales.