> you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans I don't thin

> you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans I don't think this is correct. Spotify doesn't pay a fixed rate per stream. Instead, they reserve some part of revenue for artist compensation, and then divide that based on the amount of streams and artist- or label-specific deals. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ > We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders. To calculate net revenue, we subtract the money we collect but don’t get to keep. This includes payments for things like taxes, credit card processing fees, and billing, along with some other things like sales commissions. From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare. > We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder. > Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors. Though I guess that means that lukewarm users with few streams cause higher per-stream rates, which might be indirectly beneficial to Spotify. That's not to say that the system is completely fair. Presumably, bigger artists and labels get preferential treatment in share calculations. Also, if I listen to only Ben Prunty's FTL soundtrack for a month, he doesn't get all the net revenue from my subscription; those streams are diluted in the global stream counts.