AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

Honestly, I'm kinda sick of the artists payouts argument. The music industry is incredibly saturated. Like more saturated than anything else we consume daily by far. Having a few million streams sounds really impressive until you realize that the top 1,000 streamed artists all have more than 2 billion streams, and you've probably only even heard of a quarter of them. Some generic singer songwriter dude I went to high school with has a couple million streams, but in the broad scope he's absolutely nobody compared to the big dogs.

It's a competitive field. Physical albums can still sell to collectors, but not like they used to. So if you want to make a living as a band, you have to get creative and find other ways to profit. My personal favorite band realized touring is where they get paid the most, so they do well over 100 gigs a year, all over the world, and they've been doing it for 30 years.

The biggest reason I use Spotify personally is for music discovery. I've discovered countless bands because their algorithm is great and knows what I like. The amount of money I've spent on concert tickets, t-shirts, beers at venues etc all because I heard your song a couple times thanks to an algorithm is lost on folks making the streaming payout argument. If your music is good, it will get me to come see you live. If your live show is good, I'll come back and bring a friend.

Recorded music in my opinion should be an entry point, your argument for why I should come see you instead of the literal 9.8 million other artists on Spotify. Again, it's a competitive ass field. Not to be confused with a 'competitive ass' field which sounds fun.