I’m going to say something that might get me uninvited from a few industry events: streaming is not the root of all evil in the music industry. It’s not even the primary problem. And the amount of energy we spend complaining about Spotify’s per-stream rates is energy that could be better directed elsewhere.

Before you close this tab, hear me out. I’m not saying streaming is perfect. I’m not saying the economics are fair. I’m saying that many of the problems we blame on streaming existed before streaming, and will exist after it.

The Myth of the Golden Age

When people complain about streaming, there’s an implicit comparison to a better time. Usually the CD era of the 1990s, when music industry revenue peaked globally.

But let’s be honest about what that era was actually like for most artists. The vast majority of musicians signed to major labels in the 1990s were on exploitative contracts that gave them 12-15% of net revenue after recoupable expenses. Many artists sold hundreds of thousands of CDs and still owed their label money.

Independent distribution was almost impossible without label backing. Getting your CD into stores required a distribution deal that most artists couldn’t access. Radio was controlled by a handful of programmers. Music discovery depended on knowing the right people or living in the right city.

The CD era was great for a small number of successful artists and extremely profitable for record labels. For most working musicians, it wasn’t substantially better than now.

What Streaming Actually Fixed

Streaming made distribution essentially free. Any artist can now get their music on every major platform worldwide for minimal cost. That wasn’t possible at any point in music history before about 2015.

Streaming created a discovery mechanism — however imperfect — that doesn’t depend on geographic location, radio gatekeepers, or label marketing budgets. An artist in Broken Hill can reach listeners in Berlin. That’s genuinely new.

Streaming generates consistent, ongoing revenue from catalogue. In the CD era, once a record stopped selling, the revenue stopped. Streaming income, while small per play, continues indefinitely as long as people listen. For artists with substantial back catalogues, this represents meaningful ongoing income.

Streaming also reduced piracy dramatically. Remember piracy? In the early 2010s, the music industry was losing an estimated 30-40% of potential revenue to illegal downloads. Streaming didn’t eliminate piracy, but it reduced it to a fraction of what it was.

Where the Real Problems Are

If you want to be angry about the economics of being a musician in Australia, here are some targets that deserve more attention than Spotify’s per-stream rate.

Live music infrastructure. As I’ve written before, the loss of small and medium venues across Australian cities has destroyed the development pipeline for new artists. This is a policy failure, not a streaming failure.

Housing costs. Australian musicians, like everyone else, are being crushed by housing costs. It’s hard to build a music career when your rent consumes 40-50% of your income. This affects rehearsal space availability, studio access, and the simple ability to take financial risks on a creative career.

Arts funding. Government funding for music in Australia has been flat or declining in real terms for years. The Australia Council’s funding for music projects doesn’t come close to meeting demand. State-level programs help but can’t fill the gap.

Publishing complexity. The system for collecting publishing royalties in Australia is unnecessarily complex, and many independent artists miss out on money they’re owed simply because the system is confusing and poorly explained.

Ticket monopolies. The concentration of live music ticketing through a small number of companies keeps ticket prices high and artist revenue low. Dynamic pricing is making this worse.

The Per-Stream Rate Obsession

Yes, Spotify pays roughly $0.003-0.005 per stream. That’s not much. But framing the conversation around per-stream rates misunderstands how streaming works.

Streaming is an access model, not a purchase model. You’re not selling a product to each listener; you’re earning a share of a revenue pool based on your proportion of total listening. As the revenue pool grows (and it is growing — Spotify’s revenue has increased every year), per-stream rates will eventually increase.

The more productive conversation is about how the revenue pool is divided. Spotify’s current model allocates royalties based on total streams as a proportion of all streams on the platform. Alternative models — like user-centric payment, where your subscription money goes only to artists you actually listen to — could redistribute revenue toward independent and niche artists.

The UK’s DCMS inquiry into music streaming recommended exploring user-centric payment. France has already begun implementing it. That’s the conversation worth having, not just “Spotify doesn’t pay enough.”

What I Actually Want

I want a music industry that supports diverse, independent, Australian music. Streaming is part of the toolkit for that, not the obstacle to it.

I want better venues, more affordable housing for artists, stronger arts funding, simpler royalty collection, and fairer ticketing. I want the industry to spend less time complaining about platforms and more time fixing the structural issues that actually determine whether musicians can sustain careers.

Streaming isn’t the villain. It’s a distribution method with known limitations. The sooner we stop treating it as the primary problem, the sooner we can focus on the things that will actually make a difference.