Part: 1
Have you ever had that moment? You’re halfway through a song, a new discovery or a long-time favorite, and a wave of genuine appreciation washes over you. You feel the artist’s intention, the hours of studio work, the soul poured into the performance. You might even think, “I should buy their merch or go to their show to support them.”
It’s a beautiful thought, but it’s also a quiet acknowledgment of a broken system. It’s an admission that the very act of pressing “play”—the thing you’re doing right now—doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t feel like it’s truly supporting the person who created the art you love.
You’re right to feel that way. Because in the modern music industry, your listen is worth almost nothing to the artist.
To understand why, we have to pull back the curtain on the machine that delivers the soundtrack to our lives. Think of the entire music industry as one giant, opaque pot of soup. Every month, millions of us pour our money into this pot—$10 here for a premium subscription, a few ad-generated dollars there. It all gets mixed together into one massive, undifferentiated fund.
Then, the giants who own the pot—the streaming platforms—take their hefty cut for operations, marketing, and profit. What’s left is then divvied up not based on who you listened to, but on who everyone listened to. They use a “streamshare” model. If the world’s biggest pop star accounts for 5% of all streams in a month, their rights holders get 5% of the entire royalty pool.
Your $10, which you thought was supporting the niche indie folk artist you’ve had on repeat, is actually being funneled, in part, to the global superstars at the top of the charts. The artist you love gets a fraction of a cent. A fraction. That’s the system we’ve all come to accept.
This broken economics is made worse by a confusing landscape of choices. We’re caught in a paradox of plenty and poverty. We have Spotify, with its free tier that feels like a compromise—ads interrupting the mood and audio quality that feels like a shadow of what the music could be. Then we have Apple Music, which refuses to compromise on quality, offering lossless audio and Dolby Atmos, but it comes with a price tag and a walled garden.
Add Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Wynk, Saavn… the list goes on. Each service has a different catalog, a different feature set, a different compromise. It’s a confusing world where the content you want might be scattered across different platforms, and the value you want to provide is diluted in a system you can’t see.
We’ve been conditioned to believe this is just how it is. But what if it’s not? What if the fundamental architecture of the music industry is the problem? What if the very model of a centralized jukebox, no matter how polished, is destined to undervalue art and confuse the consumer?
The question we have to ask is not “which streaming service is best?” The real question is, “What if the system wasn’t just broken for artists, but was fundamentally underserving you, the fan?” What if we could demand more?
