Pay the artist

Music got easier to access. Artists got paid less.

A stream pays an artist somewhere between a third of a cent and half a cent. Play a song a thousand times and you've moved maybe three or four dollars in their direction. Spotify will tell you, and they have a point, that per-stream is the wrong thing to count, and that roughly two-thirds of their revenue goes back to rightsholders. Fine. Both of those can be true and the musician you love still can't make rent off the platform. That's the part no framing fixes.

The platform doesn't only bill the listener. You pay every month for music you never hold. And the artist, to reach the playlists that decide what gets played, can take a 30% cut to their royalties on a song in exchange for the push. Spotify calls it Discovery Mode. A 2025 class action called it payola; in 2026 a judge pushed the case into private arbitration instead of open court. Some of what fills those same playlists comes from acts with barely a trace anywhere else, which is roughly what a business this focused on margins tends to surface. The majors, holding stakes in the platform and cutting their own terms, do fine on all of it. The one caught in the middle is the small artist.

Buy a record on Cassette and the artist keeps 95%. Cassette keeps 5%. That split is on what's left after transaction costs. No subscription pooling your money in a pot that gets divided by market share, where the biggest names eat first and the artist you came here for gets a rounding error. You pay for a record. The person who made it gets paid for it. That's the whole transaction.

It's a worse business than streaming, and that's not an accident. Subscriptions print money. So does lock-in, and so does owning the listener instead of serving the artist. The model that pays musicians properly is the one nobody with hundreds of millions on the line wanted to build.

And spare the labels the villain edit. Most of the records that rearranged your life exist because a label fronted the cash and did the unglamorous work before anyone was listening. The good independent ones are about the most artist-loyal institutions left standing. Label pages, curated collections, tools to move a catalog, those are here too. The problem was never that labels exist. The problem was a payout that starves almost everyone to feed a handful of platforms.

Owning music used to be the normal thing. You bought the record, it was yours, the artist got paid once and got paid right. The thing worth wanting back is the deal.