[mdifrgechd]

That seems orthogonal to my point that what spotify achieved, for me at least, was being a better value for money than copyright infringement. It's worth $10 a month to have all the music accessible in one place.

The licensing agreements that spotify negotiates are between them and the artists, and if artists are unhappy they can take it up with Spotify. But hopefully artists realize that for recorded performances, there is a sweet spot where the convenience of a subscription has a higher value than trivially accessing pirated recordings.

[gabereiser]

Never the artists, always the labels or distribution company (not always the same).

But to your point. Pre-Spotify I think the overall music market sales volumes and profits, offset by piracy and copyright infringement, ended up around the same overall total market value that Spotify based their subscription and payments off of (that and economics of scale).

I’ve been a Spotify subscriber for a long time so I get it. I just wish Spotify would do more to support artists, not labels, or help fix the system for indies to self-distribute.

It’s obviously way more complicated. I dream of a utopia where a platform exists not for profits sake but for the art’s sake.