They have 10000 employees. No, I don't understand why, either. They take the vast majority of the cut. They pay somewhere between $0.002 and 0.005 a stream. So if you stream your favourite song 500 times, your favourite artist might get a penny depending on label cut.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm seeing $0.003-$0.008 per steam, still peanuts though. Same article says the following though:

Spotify has not reported an annual net profit in all the years its been public. Part of this is due to the royalty fee split it has with publishers, in which it only takes 30 percent of profits.

so it's not like Spotify are taking all the money from the artists, it does seem like it's still the labels raking it in.

[–] echo64@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

this is a really helpful place to talk about how profits != revenue.

So after spotify pays itself all the money it might want to take from subscriptions and ad revenue, you are left with the "profits" which now get split 30% in favour of spotify.

[–] smeg@feddit.uk 3 points 1 year ago

True, it's all creative accounting to obfuscate what's actually going on