So the only reasonable take is, that we don't pay enough for consuming music, right? Because you have no label taking a cut and streaming services are not profitable themselves.

According to my spotify wrapped I listened to about 2500 different artists. Yearly subscription is 143,88€, so if spotify took 30% and ther rest is split equally to every artist they'd get a nice 0,0578€ from me each. For your $26 that'd mean on similar math that you'd need ~450 listeners, so it's atleast nearby the ballpark if you have 1000 streams on there.

I obviously omitted things like VAT and other taxes, payment processor fees and complexity of revenue streams in general, like how long I listened to each to keep it simple.

I'm not saying if that's fair or not, I just did quick and rough math around the data I had easily available. All I know is that for that half a cent per artist I'm not providing anything to anyone but I receive quite a lot every day.

For more detailed info you can check spotifys own report.

Looking at your Spotify page you will be an artist who gets nothing in this new plan. You have 14 average monthly listeners right now - each song needs 1000 unique listeners per year to get any sort of payout.

30% of the subscription price. That small artists get screwed over is entirely due to labels.

After the service cut has been taken, all money is put in one big pool and them divided by total number of streams and sent to the labels. How the cut between labels and artists is divided is up to individual contracts between artists and labels but usually the majority goes to the labels due to still accounting for cost of producing and shipping physical CDs. Pooling all users money also unfavourably favours big artists and is enforced by the labels as bigger artists makes them more money than smaller ones.