Are you sure about this? I hear the rates vary by platform. For example Tidal was pushing for much higher royalties as part of its push to get more artists to sign with it.
Reasonably. Without any specific knowledge, Spotify doesn't actually own the rights to music - it's the rights holders (labels) that chose to make their music available to Spotify under the terms they want.
It's 10 years old at this point, but Sony's leaked contract with Spotify basically outlines that there's no such thing as a 'per stream' rate. Roughly, all the money available was split between the labels (with most favored nation clauses to get them even more money) https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8621581/sony-music-spotif...
Also:
> Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors.
> In many cases, royalty payments happen once a month, but exactly when and how much artists and songwriters get paid depends on their agreements with their record label or distributor
Yes, the rates vary by platform. In the US, there's a combo of statutory (or CRB-approved) rates on the publisher side, and negotiations on the label side.
On the publisher/songwriter side, streams are not "public performances" under the Copyright Act (in the US), so royalties are not handled by the court-sanctioned monopolies that have been in place since the early 20th century (ASCAP, BMI).
And if publishers and/or labels were able to obtain better rates - via direct negotiations, the CRB, or otherwise - presumably some of those fractional cents per stream would trickle down to the artists and songwriters who are already in notoriously oppressive contracts with the major label and publisher oligopoly.
"Artists don't get paid fairly" is a tale that existed long before Spotify existed.