I love when corpos get scammed or stolen from. They know that the game is "take what you can" and it's about time the plebs learned that too.
In a way, the same tends to be true whenever people take from “corpos.” That money ultimately comes from people in some form.
Worst part is that Spotify gained a lot more than 10m from letting this go on for 7 years. I doubt they weren't aware of this, but allowed it becsuse those bots let them attract a lot more than $10m worth of viewers. That's why I have no sympathy.
Here’s mine:
“ Unlike physical sales or downloads, which pay artists a fixed price per song or album sold, Spotify pays royalties based on the artist's "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service. Spotify distributes approximately 70% of its total revenue to rights holders, who then pay artists based on their individual agreements. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
Spotify didn’t make a single cent less than they usually do because of this.
This is basically a 3rd party helping with the first step. If you want to look at raw revenue over 7 years, maybe Spotify made less. But they definitely profitted by time by allowing it to go on until it was not longer useful (especially now. As Spotify is using music to train their own AI models. Ai generated music will just mess up the model).
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Do I have any hard evidence Spotify specifically does this? Not on hand, but I wouldn't be surprised if I can actually dig up Spotify dirt. This is documented for several other large scale tech companies. I'd honestly be surprised if Spotify was a special case.
I hope that explanation suffices, or is at least more satifactory than what you interpreted as "no, you're wrong".