You're right on what they're doing, but not the why:

1. They're getting the short end of the deal with music licensing (as are artists, btw)

2. They can't pay the artists more: the vast majority of the money goes to labels

3. The only way Spotify can grow profits if it moves to content that's not under the iron grip of the labels: podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783435

You're forgetting:

4. Once Spotify wrests power from the labels, they start the enshitification process themselves.

I'm old school - I tend not to blame people (or companies, for that matter) now for things they might do in the future.

And yet somehow TIDAL is able to between three and four times the royalties per stream that Spotify does.

Maybe Spotify could pay Joe Rogan a little less than a quarter billion dollars for a couple of years of podcasts.

> And yet somehow TIDAL is able to between three and four times the royalties per stream that Spotify does.

Looks like they do allocation differently between popular and indie artists, but the overall share, as percentage of revenue, is similar from what I've found searching online. The major record labels pressing for an allocation algorithm that favors them is kinda obvious.

This means that for an indie artist TIDAL is probably better - but not because Spotify itself is paying less, but because TIDAL was able to avoid being pressed into paying larger share to the record labels.

We get these numbers thrown online without saying if it's comparing direct artist payout, which plans are counted (Spotify has free plans, and free users are still counted in streams), is the artist indie, niche with record contract or very popular with record contract.

See: https://www.reddit.com/r/TIdaL/comments/1jxkoil/tidal_pays_a...

I don't listen to podcasts in general, wouldn't listen to Rogan even if I did listen to podcasts, and I buy (rent, tbh) my audiobooks from another evil company.

But even if they spent all that money on artists, the payouts would rise by 0.75% (percent of current, not cents): $11B artist payouts in 2025, $250M Rogan multi-year contract, assuming 3 years: 100 x (0.25 ÷ 3) ÷ 11 = 0.75%

Also, it doesn't make sense to compare a niche indie music artist with the most popular podcaster in the world. You should compare mega-stars with mega-stars.

Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, The Weekend and Ariana Grande - neither of which I ever want to listen to on Spotify or anywhere else - got more money from Spotify than Rogan. (https://www.thestreet.com/entertainment/highest-paid-artists...)

I gave up on Spotify when they did their push into podcasts and audiobooks. It became clear that they weren't really interested in serving their core customer base of people who just want to listen to music.