> If someone doesn’t listen to major artists then revenue from them shouldn’t go to said creators. Well I do not have the numbers here, but I would argue that

> If someone doesn’t listen to major artists then revenue from them shouldn’t go to said creators. Well I do not have the numbers here, but I would argue that this is definitely not the case in reality. > Spotify however wants to maximize its cut and so has incentives to shift money from less popular artists if it can entice major labels to its platform It’s the other way around, because the platform has competing interests: Spotify wants to have the labels to sell an “optionality” to the users (I.e. get the money from subs) but in terms of reproduction/execution Spotify wants to reproduce the maximum of podcasts and/or long tail artists because in those 2 cases Spotify does not spend a single penny. The labels has a very high bargaining power over Spotify due to its catalog, so as expected this is the biggest expenditure. That’s one of the reasons why Spotify is desperately pushing podcasts like crazy.