Yes and no. They do not pay out per stream. They pay out a set % of their total revenue to rights holders. Spotify has to pay the exact same amount of money be

Yes and no. They do not pay out per stream. They pay out a set % of their total revenue to rights holders. Spotify has to pay the exact same amount of money before and after that change. The savings for Spotify is in not having the (not so insignificant) administrative overhead of trying to make hundreds of thousands of basically worthless payouts to different individuals that are worth <$5 or even <$1. I think it's fairly reasonable to draw some sort of lower bound on the minimum you need to reach to get a payout, especially in a world where basically anyone can put music on their service.