Report: https://loudandclear.byspotify.com

1

The music business is opaque. And that’s the way those inside like it. Because they can play fast and loose with the money… Isn’t that what the Live Nation conversation between those two employees is all about, the company screwing the ignorant public?

Maybe you missed that story. If so, here goes:

“‘Robbing Them Blind’: Live Nation Employees Joked About Fees – A series of private exchanges in the messaging system Slack were revealed as exhibits in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against the concert giant.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/arts/music/live-nation-ticketmaster-trial-fees-slacks.html

Now the funny thing is it’s not only Live Nation (and its competitors) who don’t want the truth to come out, but the acts themselves. If breakdowns of every show were posted… The fans would still blame Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the ticketing company and the promoter. Because they just can’t believe that the acts are at fault, that they bear any responsibility for high ticket prices, that without the fees, the economics don’t work, there is no show. Again and again Live Nation says that the acts set ticket prices. And let’s put aside club gigs… Once you grow into theatres, the artist’s team might ask the promoter for its opinion on pricing and scaling, but the buck stops with the act. Then again, if an act wants a certain gross, wants to walk away from the tour with a large pot of money, inherently ticket prices will be higher. Conversely, if the act wants to charge less for tickets, then it’s a field day for bots and the secondary market. But somehow the consumer doesn’t want to accept any of this, people just believe they should be able to get a great seat for a low price and scalp the ticket themselves if they want to.

As for the antitrust case… Are you aware of the Apple iBooks antitrust lawsuit? Amazon was paying publishers full wholesale, but selling books for under ten bucks to build a business. But Apple was employing the agency system. Which means the publisher can set whatever price it wants, and Apple will take 30% of that. I’m not going to walk you through all the details, but the bottom line here is the antitrust case made Amazon go to the agency system as well, meaning…THE PRICE OF E-BOOKS WENT UP! FOR EVERYONE! Which is antithetical to the theory of antitrust, that it’s about harm to the consumer. That’s how intelligent the government is.

As for the Live Nation/Ticketmaster case… That’s the true question, if you split off the company, if you change the game as per the settlement just reached, will the consumer benefit, will prices go down and will they find it easier to get a ticket? ABSOLUTELY NOT! But nobody in the government can see or accept this.

2

Word on the street is that Spotify is the devil, that it is ripping artists off, if it pays at all. I mean someone’s got to be blamed for the fact that the act isn’t making more money. And no matter what you tell people, you can’t change their mind. It’s like MAGA, doesn’t matter what Trump does, they hate the LIBS.

But Spotify is a tech company. Those are the roots of the two founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. And tech is about digital, zeros and ones, there’s no fudging, because if there was the system, the program, wouldn’t work.

And the ethos of the Millennials and Gen-Z is far different from that of the Baby Boomers and Gen-X. Boomers believed music should be free, back in the SIXTIES! The younger generations don’t mind people making money, as long as they can see all the evidence, be walked through the steps. These are the entrepreneurial generations. Not buying insurance by becoming a doctor or lawyer, but believing in themselves and taking risks.

And the truth is the younger generations have no problem with Spotify. It’s the oldsters who do… Who want to go back to the label model of yore, before the internet. But their cries are dying out. Remember all the oldsters complaining about the audio quality of digital files? That was batted about FOR YEARS! And now hi-res is available and most people don’t bother to pay for it or have the equipment to hear it.

It’s kind of like politics. Did you read that 85 year old Representative Jim Clyburn is running for another term, his 18th in Congress? Man, I’d like to get him in a conversation about TikTok and social media. He’s inherently out of touch. And I know this is true… I’m constantly doing podcasts with Boomers who don’t know the tech, who tell me their computers broke. Bottom line…if you’ve got a Mac, they’re almost bulletproof. Just reboot. This is not the eighties anymore. Can I tell you how many times I’ve fixed people’s iPhones and Macs when they were ready to go to the Apple Store?

Of course, of course, there are old people who are tech-savvy, but the world is based on generalizations, except in tech.

So, Spotify has put up Loud&Clear, which answers every question people have about streaming and how the company works. Whenever anybody tells you how bad Spotify is, point them to this site. It’s exhaustive. And potentially exhausting. People want it simple, bite-sized, and they prefer emotion to facts.

3

Here is the summary:

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-03-11/loud-and-clear-music-economics-highlights/

But the bottom line is more people are making more money.

Here’s where it gets dicey. When I tell people they’re not entitled to compensation if people don’t stream their music. Where in business does this concept play? Does a commission salesperson get paid a big salary when they sell very little? Does everybody who can shoot a basket earn a place in the NBA? Then again, the world runs on delusion.

You should read each and every point in the above link, click on the ten Takeaways, expanding them for more information.

In addition, you should read the FAQ:

Your Questions, Answered

My favorite is: “Why does the ‘per-stream rate’ appear lower for Spotify than some other streaming services?”

Of course there’s no per-stream rate, and that is explained in depth in this report. But the nougat is:

“The average Spotify listener streams 3 to 4 times more music per month than the average listener of other streaming services.”

I could do the math for you, but either you get it or you don’t. But underneath that is the fact that Spotify is where active music listeners go. Where the fans are. You can be a king on another service but still be a pawn in the game. If you’re a king on Spotify, you are truly royalty.

And the increased listening and market share and ultimate payouts are why competing platforms won’t release their own reports, won’t be as transparent. Then again, are the others pure music companies or is music a sideshow.

Which brings me to that inane “Death of Spotify” article that I wrote about, that people keep e-mailing me.

To think Jimmy Iovine is a seer of technology is like saying Clyburn is one too. Boomer Jimmy is all about the old world, and he’s pissed someone moved his cheese.

But the bottom line is…if you think Spotify is about to die, you’d better short Apple and Nvidia too. Because the odds of the streaming company going under are as miniscule as those of the two tech giants caving.

But it makes a good story.

Then again, the labels used to run the music business, now it’s the promoters, it’s all about live. And those holding the short end of the stick don’t like that they’re no longer all-powerful.

But it gets better. One of the questions in the FAQ is:

“Would the user-centric model be fairer?”

They link to the French report and a summary from MusicAlly.

If you click through to the summary:

French study offers new data on impact of user-centric payouts

You’ll find out that:

“Among the key findings: switching to a user-centric system would reduce the royalties paid out to rightsholders of the top 10 artists by 17.2% – they’d get 7.7% of the overall payouts rather than 9.3%. The result would be small percentage gains further down the pyramid: an average 1.3% increase for artists ranked 11-100; 2.2% for those ranked 101-1,000; 0.5% for those between 1,001 and 10,000; and 5.2% for those outside the top 10,000.”

And you must read the following paragraph:

“‘If the percentages of change seem not insignificant, the amounts in value remain in reality limited,’ warned the CNM in its summary of the findings. That 5.2% average increase for artists outside the top 10,000 would be ‘at most a few euros per year on average’ for those musicians.”

And there you have it, the user-centric model is a canard.

And speaking of MusicAlly, they have a great summary of Loud&Clear here:

80 artists are generating $10m-plus of Spotify payouts a year

4

Most people can’t handle the truth. Which is Spotify isn’t the devil, it didn’t kill the music business, IT SAVED IT!

But now everybody can play and everybody can complain. The most vociferous e-mail I receive about the system is from those not in it. That’s the internet, everybody is entitled to a voice, but not every voice is worth listening to.

Streaming is here to stay. There’s nothing past streaming, it’s on demand. You get it when you need it, and it’s available instantly. What could be better than that?

And there are other ways to make money from recordings, like Patreon and SoundCloud… Go for it! But that’s marginal artists making money from fans. At least they’re marginal in terms of absolute streams, compared to who is successful on Spotify.

Let me just quote the MusicAlly report above, to make it perfectly clear:

“Spotify said that more than 1,500 artists generated more than $1m in payouts in 2025, while more than 13,800 generated at least $100k. The usual caveat being that this is before rightsholders and distributors took their cuts.

“The 13,800 figure is nearly 1,400 up on last year’s report, while Spotify offered another angle on the payout-millionaires stat. ‘Capturing just 1% of streams from 1% of listeners is enough to earn $1 million in annual royalties from Spotify.’

“‘In 2025, the 100,000th-highest-earning artist generated more than $7,300 in royalties from Spotify alone. In 2015, the artist in that same position generated about $350,’ added Spotify in its summary of the trends in this year’s report.”

Read it and weep.

Or maybe you can see that the future’s so bright you’ve got to wear shades.

But not for everybody, but it never was.

5

Let’s hope for more of this, more transparency, but don’t bet on it. This is the essence of the entertainment business, ripping people off. Just ask the actors with net profit participations in the hit films they appeared in. When I was practicing law, we represented an actor who had a net profit participation in the second biggest film of the year. He never saw a dime, it remained in a negative position. Creative accounting. If the hits don’t make money, how can the studios survive? But the truth is they do make money, they just employ accounting tricks to make sure they’re not sharing it.

That’s not what Spotify is doing and Loud&Clear lays it all out.

I’d read it before you start pontificating how bad Spotify is.