Historically, artists never made much money selling music. Artists made most of their music going on tour, selling merch, or monetizing their likeness. In the

Historically, artists never made much money selling music. Artists made most of their music going on tour, selling merch, or monetizing their likeness. In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and European pop charts as The KLF (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/how-three-austrian-unknowns-misunderstood-klf-s-the-manual https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/...). They never made a pound touring. Their success and much of their impact was tied to European club playlists, the sales of singles, album sales, and the media. You can talk to many other artists from that era who did depend on touring and merch, but also used distribution and sales of singles and albums (and advances on record deals) to establish themselves. While plastic media was doomed long before Spotify, this "audio-based customer acquisition channel" is, by design, set up to benefit Spotify, record labels, and top artists, in that order. Everyone else in the 98.6% tier gets the scraps.