At the end of the day, if the absence of spotify/super cheap streaming created a larger profit pie to distribute between the record companies and artists, wouldn't both parties opt to stay off spotify?
I don't know if the pool is necessarily larger without spotify. The dollars per artist that "makes it" is probably larger though. But like you said it's harder to "make it" in the old system. It's a really complicated issue.
And in light of this detour I'll reiterate that I don't think it's a stretch for artists to complain about Joe Rogan making 100s of millions peddling bullshit while artists (who really are the foundation of spotify) get crap on for the most part. Also I don't know the tweet, but a lot of artists don't have the power to pull their music off spotify in their current contract situation. Neil's pulling work for a lot of folks.
i don't think it's a stretch either. if they want to complain about their value relative to Joe Rogan, they should. the economics are really apples and oranges though.
Between 1/21 and 1/27, rogan released 4 episodes totaling 12 hours. each episode is averaging 10 million some odd streams. Even if you assume that the average listen is just 50 percent of each episode that's still
60 million streaming hours in less than a week week of people listening to spotify. Spotify's most streamed song ever is Ed Sheeran's shape of you, which is a ~4 minute song that has just north of 3 billion listens (after 5 years), and (generously assuming that each listen is to 100% of the song) equates to about 200,000,000 hours - which Rogan reaches in about a month, every month. In that respect, it's pretty easy to understand why Spotify is giving a king's ransom to Rogan.
Doing some napkin math, let's assume that that .003/stream model equates to spotify's valuation of 3.5 minutes of spotify streaming. That equates to about $0.0515/hour of streaming. Applied to a monthly average of 200,000,000 hours, Rogan would be earning about
$10,285,000 per month if he was on a $.003/3.5 minutes deal. and that's not even including the back catalog. all of a sudden, a raw $100 million dollar deal (assuming no other streaming royalties) looks like a pretty good bargain for spotify.
like i said, it's apples and oranges, and there are a lot of assumptions above, but it shows how much raw time people are spending on spotify listening to rogan each week.