This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to on

This seems quite reasonable. I have quite an uncommon taste in music so I tend to listen to artists with very small followings. I know most songs I listen to only have a few thousand views in total on YouTube, so I was initially worried that it would be similar on Spotify so just took a look... Spotify seems to be about x10 whatever the stats are on YouTube so almost all of the songs I listen to qualify for monetisation. The only exceptions are tiny self-recording artists I've randomly stubbled on from browsing Soundcloud or other corners of the internet. I find it hard to see how this decision would impact small artists to be honest. Maybe if an artist had thousands of tracks all with ~500 streams then it might impact them, but I'm guessing small artists who are currently monetised are making almost nothing anyway from their handful of songs with under <1,000 streams – assuming they only have 2-3 albums worth of music. Supporting monetisation on all songs is probably more headache than it's worth when you're dealing with paying out a few cents. Honestly the best thing you can do to support small artists isn't stream their music, but share it with your friends, donate to them and buy their merch (assuming they have merch because many won't).