How to Save Content Creators from the Spotify Death Spiral

It’s time to artificially limit the supply of content in order to prop up pay rates, the way we did during the Depression for farmers

In 2020, just 184,000 artists made more than $1,000 from uploading their songs to the Spotify platform. That’s out of a much larger universe of more than 3 million artists on the music platform.

Spotify is one of the lowest paying streaming sites, offering about 1/3 of a penny per stream. Amazon Music pays 4/10 of a cent. Apple Music pays a penny.

To make $1,000 a year, a typical YouTuber needs to get about 1,500 views per day, or more than half a million per year, according to InfluenceMarketingHub.com.

And here on Medium, you can earn somewhere between half a penny and two cents per view (the number varies because the site also factors in how long a reader is engaged with an article). So to make $1,000, you’d need your stories to reach somewhere around 100,000 views.

From the platforms’ point of view, these piecemeal rates make sense, since they’re in the business of selling thousands of eyeballs (or eardrums) at a time to advertisers. Supporting artists or writers isn’t really their problem, and the more content-creators…