> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.

My spotify wrapped says I listened for 50,000 minutes this year. Assuming 2 minutes per song, that's 25,000 streams. I paid them $110, aka $0.004/stream. Assuming I'm a typical user, they obviously could not afford to pay any more than that per stream.

I googled "spotify pay per listen" and the first result is a reddit comment saying "The average payout on Spotify is only $0.004 per stream." The google AI overview says "Spotify [..] pays artists a fraction of a cent, typically $0.003 to $0.005 per stream". So I'll assume it's something in that ballpark.

So it seems like Spotify's payouts are completely reasonable, given their pricing. Is my logic wrong somewhere?

> Nobody is gonna download a 300TB torrent just to get the latest Taylor Swift album

Well, no. They'll just select the album download it selectively from the torrent.

No but the rip is a perfect tool for bad actors to profit from the music without paying licensing fees

> What’s actually scummy is Spotify paying artists $1 per 1000 streams.

I'm pretty sure it's waaaay lower than that per 1000 streams.

How about we let the individual artists decide?