I believe it's extremely lopsided. The top artists take up a lion's share of the revenue while smaller artists make much much lower than what they used to make in sales. Smaller artists mostly use the streaming platforms for publicity and then make most of their money from their performances.

1. That graph shows adjusted revenues lower than the 90s and early 2000s and even one or two years in the 70s.

2. It’s not a chart of what artists take home, but rather raw top line revenue, and it seems clear from all available evidence that the economics of Spotify et al are significantly worse for artists than they were with CDs. People have accepted this because it seemed better than piracy where revenue is zero.

Nope. Streaming cannibalized recording sales, where artists got more of that revenue. Payouts for artists on streaming are fractional and arguably opaque than per recording sales (most of the problems of record company contracts & accounting and then a few more to boot). They don't take home the revenue you're seeing here.

We had a missed opportunity to let digital recording retail replace media sales, the Bandcamp model could have been bigger. Spotify moved fast and broke a lot of things and did more goddamned damage to the sector than "piracy" by adopting the fundamental business model with a bit of convenience and veneer of legitimacy.