For whatever reason, the ability to arrange music licensing to allow for an aggregator of everything is much easier than for movie and TV show licensing.
If I pay £15 a month and listen to 15 different artists 50 times each I would expect each artist to get £1 minus costs, so say 50p.
But they don’t, they instead get a fraction of that.
I like Spotify and use it a lot, but I think their UI is somewhat okay at best.
Less convenient in the AI/recommendation sense, for me Spoty was the best. I use yt music to save some bucks but spoti was superior
I have a deal with myself, that I'm a few months behind on actually, to spend at least $10 a month (the equivalent of my old Google music sub) on Bandcamp - and on primarily Australian music, to support local in my minimal way.
When I was younger I’d always have music playing in the background but now I only listen to music intentionally – mostly when I’m walking in town or on public transport. I usually download a select number of albums in advance and listen to complete albums at a time – just as I did with other media. Ideally, my monthly Spotify spend would be divided among the few artists that I actually listen to. Instead, the (small) share of revenue that the artist gets is their fractional share of what everyone else is listening to (most likely as background† music, selected by a Spotify algorithm or playlist), i.e., it’s not proportional to the amount of times that I listen to the artist.
† I’d often hear good music being played in a small (usually independent, not a chain) store or café where the workers have some control over what they’re listening to in their work-place. In the past, I used to discover new music and have some good conversations by asking staff in a shop what is the music they’re playing on the sound system. For the past few years, that hasn’t worked so well: the staff stare blankly, are surprised at the question and/or show no interest in what’s being fed to them by Spotify.
Spotify takes the blame, but the record labels take the lion's share.
There’s no such thing as casual music discovery though with piracy. It’s a bit like visiting the largest record store ever built. You’ve gotta thumb through the albums and talk to the other nerds.