Check out the "The Dark Side of Spotify" video on youtube, very enlightening. Spotify is paying lower than most the other streaming platforms as well. Some of the others are subscription only though. Being a 'musician' or 'artist' has become just a side hustle because you need something else to make your music heard enough to make a livable wage from it. Become a Meme Youtuber and funnel your fanbase to music to monetize them further. If you want to survive off just being an 'artist' then you need to make music to a fanbase that listens. Music is a background activity mostly. We all mostly love it, we feel like we support it but its just not engaging. It needs a meme video or something for social media to engage with it and get it in front of more people who will enjoy it. In general, A Spotify link doesn't get updoots.

This is in essence the problem of centralized powerful entities. They serve not-only as gate-keepers but their algos and commercial interests shape and even dictate industry standards. This creates in turn a uniformisation of culture with side effects such as cultural appropriation. Its difficult because they become sort of closed loops where you need to join in order to get exposure but you need to conform to succeed and finally you have no choice but to accept their policies and conditions. At the end content producers have very limited space of freedom if they choose to use such services.