The people bitching about Spotify have a legitimate beef... but they also don't understand that the record industry was rapacious, too. I had a buddy who made $1500 a month off of MP3.com (remember that?) and a label wanted to sign him. They offered $15k against recoupable expenses for a three album deal... which basically meant $15k is all you'll ever see for three albums plus when you tour we're going to bill you so you'll probably end up owing us money. He decided to write text to speech software instead. The band gets minimum wage, by the way. That's minimum wage divided by however many members. 180,000 streams is a little less than $900. Which is like a factor of five more than Youtube pays.
Looking at the nasty deals that you hear about from group to group, it's obvious that the record industries were for sure getting more than their fair share. 15k for 3 albums is one of the worst I've ever heard. But now your friend could legitimately record those three albums for the cost of a computer and maybe a couple thousand dollars in mics and whatever other setup pieces you would have to buy but could probably borrow if you had a friend. And the labels are probably still making the same deals while they bitch about their declining revenues. If you only put your music up on Spotify, or only on YouTube, or only one place whatever, then you can count just the income of Spotify or that one place, but really you can post to iTunes and to Spotify and to YouTube, and there's no real duplication of efforts after you have a quality digital recording. So you have multiple income streams which duplicate eachother. Here's a good breakdown of all the streamers and how much they pay per stream If you were to get on all ten of the top 10 from that sheet (which covers 99 percent of streaming, and get 180,000 streams from each of them (not easy I'm sure), then you'd have a monthly income of $20,444. But only $980 a month if you weight by marketshare to see how many of those 180,000 original ones really get split across the services.