Artist to Arsenal

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Every morning I check my Spotify for Artists dashboard like someone checking their pulse. Today: 26,300 monthly listeners, over 20 million total streams across platforms. 21 people are currently listening. In any reasonable world, this would represent extraordinary success. Instead, I'm calculating whether my $107 in pending royalties covers half my groceries while platform owner Daniel Ek just invested €600 million of accumulated artist revenues into military AI technology.

In June 2025, Ek's investment firm Prima Materia led a massive funding round for Helsing, an AI-powered military startup now valued at €12 billion. This follows his previous €100 million investment in the company back in 2021. Every stream of my song "Animal Crossing" - a goofy love letter to the cozy Nintendo game - generates revenue that flows through Spotify's system to help fund battlefield analysis and weapons systems. My catalog of songs about feelings, fun games, and human vulnerability is contributing to a revenue pool that enables autonomous weapons development, one fraction of a penny at a time.

This is not abstract moral philosophy. It's direct complicity through a business model designed to extract maximum value from artists while concentrating wealth at the top: wealth that Ek then deploys to mechanize human suffering. The streaming economy hasn't only failed artists economically; it's turned our creative labor into an unwitting funding mechanism for the military-industrial complex.

Cool Math Games

We love numbers, folks, we really do: With 34,400 monthly listeners, I'm in roughly the top 1-2% of all Spotify artists globally, a statistical reality that makes the economics even more upsetting and bizarre. Nearly 80% of artists on Spotify have monthly audiences smaller than 50 people. Just 21.6% have audiences greater than 50 listeners. Yet my current monthly earnings of $100-$120 translate to approximately $0.004-$0.005 per listener per month. In a way, I'm also "lucky" I see numbers this "high" - I release through my own label and own my masters - the only fees I pay are a flat percentage to distribution to get me onto these platforms in the first place.

If each of my monthly listeners bought a single song on iTunes for $0.99 just once per year, I'd earn $33,957 annually. Instead, after nine years of music creation and accumulating 20+ million streams, I'm earning roughly $1,500-$2,200 annually from streaming, before tax. My millions of streams have generated approximately $16,000 over 9 years; less than the cost of a 9-year-old Kia.

Spotify pays between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, depending on if it's a premium user and where they are located in the world. To earn even $1,500 monthly - barely livable anywhere - I'd need roughly 375,000-500,000 streams per month. My current listeners would need to stream my music 11-15 times more than they already do each month to hit that threshold. The math reveals a system architected to funnel wealth upward while artists subsidize their own exploitation.

While I'm playing with my streaming pennies, Prima Materia has pledged €1 billion toward European tech investments over the decade, with defense technology forming a significant focus since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. At a time when genocide unfolds across multiple continents, when military AI threatens to further mechanize human conflict, every artist using Spotify indirectly funds weapons development through their creative labor. I'm sure we're all feeling really great about that!

Artists like Darren Sangita have pulled their music from the platform, writing "This is so vile. Music is NOT War!" But many artists find themselves trapped. Max Collins of Eve 6 has spoken extensively about being unable to leave Spotify due to contractual obligations with his record label. The platform has achieved monopolistic control over digital music distribution, making boycotts a non-starter for most musicians. To be blunt, I'm not in the economic position to say no outright to 100 to 150 dollars a month. A cheap price for morals, to be sure, and a point of failure / humiliation personally, but man - I need to pay my fucking rent.

The New Scam Economy

Spotify has simultaneously created new forms of exploitation disguised as opportunity, because if you're going to be evil you might as well go all in. Enter "Discovery Mode"; the platform's most insidious innovation. Artists can accept up to a 30% cut in already meager royalty rates in exchange for algorithmic manipulation that boosts their tracks in Radio and Autoplay contexts.

This is payola, plain and simple. By 2023, industry reporting based on former employee communications revealed Spotify employees celebrating Discovery Mode's success. More than 50% of artists earning between $50,000 and $500,000 annually had participated, generating €61.4 million in gross profit for Spotify in a single year. Artists desperate for visibility literally pay the platform through reduced royalties for the privilege of maybe being heard. If I asked you for 30% of your paycheck for a dice roll to maybe earn a quarter of a percent of it back, I would hope you'd blow my head smooth off my shoulders.

But don't worry, the exploitation doesn't stop there! Beyond accepting half-pay for algorithmic manipulation, Spotify now charges artists directly for promotion through Marquee campaigns. Minimum budget: $100. Maximum: $10,000. Cost per click: up to $0.55. The same platform that pays me $0.004 per stream wants hundreds or thousands of dollars to show my music to people who might already want to hear it. Who are already following me. Who, by virtue of using a platform that argues algorithmic music discovery as a core tenet of its functionality and value proposition, might expect these recommendations as part of their monthly payment.

Think about the math again: each person who clicks on a sponsored Marquee campaign would need to stream a new album roughly 25 times for the artist to break even on that single fan's interest. Spotify has lovingly engineered a system where artists pay the platform both through reduced royalties and direct cash payments, while the platform owner uses accumulated profits to fund sci-fi death machines (but surprisingly not turkish hair implants).

Or better clothes; "Hey fellow music, I love guitar! Now submit to my will."

Another Middle Class Elimination

I exist in what some industry analysts call the "musical middle class"; artists with relatively substantial audiences who cannot sustain careers on streaming income alone. This demographic is experiencing systematic elimination, designed to concentrate power among mega-stars and major labels while forcing everyone else into precarious gig-economy conditions. Music is certainly not the only industry facing these exact conditions!

Spotify's 2024 implementation of a 1,000-stream minimum threshold for royalty payments exemplifies this strategy. The policy change affected an estimated $46 million in potential artist earnings, money that now remains in Spotify's coffers. The platform simultaneously faced a Grammy songwriter boycott over bundling policies that reduced songwriter royalties by approximately $150 million annually.

The streaming economy has created a winner-take-most system where 78.4% of artists have fewer than 50 monthly listeners, while the top fraction captures most revenue. The dark irony is that streaming platforms have made artists like me more discoverable than ever while making it economically impossible to focus on the art people are discovering.

Say Hi to Your Silent Collaborator

The discovery mechanisms do work, which makes this situation psychologically frustrating. My music has reached listeners across dozens of countries through algorithmic recommendations. Songs I released in 2016 still find new audiences through Spotify's "Discover Weekly" playlists. I've achieved global reach that would have been impossible for independent artists in previous eras. I am aware of this.

But success requires treating this reach as discovery rather than income, and now even discovery demands payment. Beyond reduced royalties and promotional spending, the entire ecosystem has become a complex pay-to-play operation where the algorithm becomes a silent collaborator whose preferences shape artistic decisions, and those preferences can be bought by those already holding power. Hmm, sounds familiar..

Cool side effect: I've learned to think about music in terms of algorithmic optimization, and I fuuuucking hate that. Hooks that engage listeners within the first 30 seconds. Track structures that align with platform preferences. Metadata that maximizes discoverability. The algorithm shapes artistic choices whether you want it to or not. Even when you consciously write against it, you have to wonder: Is this smart? Would I have made this choice had I not known?

Wasn't I Supposed to be a Musician?

This transforms modern musicians into multimedia business managers who happen to create music. I maintain a full-time career outside music, supplemented by freelance production work. The grave disconnect: a year of streaming revenue often equals half of what a single commercial production project generates.

I spend significant time analyzing streaming data, managing social media presence, coordinating client work, and maintaining direct fan engagement across multiple platforms. The artistic process becomes one element in a complex operation requiring skills in marketing, data analysis, logistics, and customer service; all while the platform owner invests my generated revenue in head wax and machine guns.

This would be morally reprehensible in any era, but it's particularly disgusting given our current context. With wealth inequality reaching historic extremes, Spotify's business model represents a perfect crystallization of how capitalism transforms human creativity into tools of oppression. Independent artists have seen their livelihoods destroyed by the pandemic, their touring income eliminated, their streaming royalties further reduced by Discovery Mode; and now they witness the wealth they generate funneling toward military investment during unprecedented global instability.

The timing couldn't be more obscene. As wars rage across multiple continents, as AI systems threaten to further exacerbate countless disparities, as artists struggle to afford basic necessities, the platform that controls music distribution uses its artist-generated revenue to fund the very technologies that make all these things and more worse. I'm not even touching on the flood of AI generated music and playlists that artists now have to compete with on Spotify. In short, fuck these guys.

You Should Be Grateful

After nine years navigating this system, I've finally reached the uncomfortable truth: the Spotify paradox isn't a bug; it's the feature. The platform is designed to concentrate wealth, exploit labor, and redirect cultural value toward capital accumulation. This is not my first day on this planet. I understand everything in capitalist society is built this way, but we've reached such incredible heights, we've stripped away all the pretense: there is something so darkly perverse about investing a fortune built off love songs to kill people. We're living in a Verhoeven movie, but I don't even get to be Robocop.

Frustration lies in recognizing that streaming platforms solved real distribution problems. My music reaches listeners who genuinely connect with my saccharine and goofy songs about feelings and nostalgia. These connections have real value and have improved my life in more meaningful ways than I could possibly count. But these solutions come packaged with systematic exploitation that makes artistic sustainability impossible, and then kicks you in the balls with what it's all funding.

If Spotify tripled artist payouts, Ek would, of course, still be extraordinarily wealthy, bald, and perfectly capable of investing in military technology. The current payout structure isn't economically necessary, it's a choice that prioritizes billionaire war investments over artist sustainability. The very artists that provide the platform its only value are treated like ants beneath very expensive boots.

Now for the folk that, after all this, are still saying "You should be happy to even get 10 dollars for something you made." Sure, man. I am happy that people derive worth out of what I create, that's not the issue - the issue is how much value I am creating that slips through my hands for other people to then invest in destroying the world.

Success in this era currently requires accepting contradictions rather than resolving them. It means building careers that use streaming for discovery while generating income through other means. It means treating platform metrics as useful information rather than success measures. It means understanding that artistic reach and economic sustainability operate in different systems that might occasionally intersect, but will never align.

I feel grateful for the life my music has given me while remaining heartbroken by its implications. I'm a streaming-era musician: globally connected but locally grounded, thankful for opportunities while horrified by their moral cost. The music is streamed but not sustained, discovered but not compensated, emotionally resonant but economically irrelevant, creatively fulfilling but ethically compromised.

In the end, every artist on Spotify faces the same choice: participate in a system that exploits your labor to fund horrors beyond our comprehension, or abandon the primary means of reaching your audience. It's not really a choice at all - which is exactly how the platform intended it.

The machine doesn't care about my feelings. But it sure knows how to monetize them.

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osmo@cosmicosmo.co