No musician I know expects to make a living from streaming royalties. (For that matter, no touring musician I know expects to making a living from touring, either--it's a losing proposition.) The point isn't about making a living from streaming, but about fairness and equity. The streaming services are making tons of money, but the vast majority of musicians aren't.
I don't necessarily agree with picking on the streaming services. I don't have a rock hard opinion on this, but hear me out. I think it's the modern day version of picking on Tower Records because they needed to sell CD's at $20.00 ($31.00 inflation adjusted from 2000 - wow) to make a profit and made basically nothing on the $13.99 new releases. We all knew and heard anecdotally that 95% of the money went to the record company, and it's no different than today with streamers.
1. Spotify - took in 12 BILLION in revenue in 2023, but they are not profitable. They hope to be this year finally with 236M
paid subscribers and something like another 450M ad supported users. Think about that - 600M people can subscribe/use a service and the
retailer (Spotify) cannot be profitable - incredible. So, we can deduce the the lions share is going to the record label, as it should IMO, however how the label distributes to the
Artists - that is a whole other conversation, and we all know its peanuts.
2. Apple Music - impossible to know if they're profitable, since Apple Music - and all of their services - are more about keeping the customer in their ecosystem, and quite possibly (probably) operates at a loss if looked at independently.
3. Tidal -
made 7M in gross profit, which is a worthless # to know. Who knows what the bottom line is after expenses, but they are failing.
4. Quboz - who knows, the company is private.