But the artists never made any money in the first place. Spotify allowed for the insanely long tail of no-play artists to get a platform to begin with, paying a nominal fee seems like not that big of a deal, considering the same folks would never have gotten any exposure.
Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.