In 2024, Spotify alone paid out a record $10 billion to the music industry—totaling nearly $60 billion since our founding.

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-01-28/on-our-10-billion-milestone-and-a-decade-of-getting-the-world-to-value-music/

You have to remember that prior to Spotify the music industry was desperate, as people turned to downloading mp3's illegally the music industry basically just resorted to suing people who potentially downloaded a song.

I'm also very highly sceptical of this whole article, from the crappy accounting to

Lidarr is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be misused. Yes, people could point it at less-than-legal sources

My setup uses sabnzbd integrated with Lidarr for handling downloads of content I've purchased

Riiiiiight.

You're just hooked up into a piracy platform that pays artists nothing by coincidence.

On top of this:

In 2024, more musicians are making and releasing music than ever before. In fact, a new report has found that more music is released in a single day now than in the entire year of 1989.

Music simply isn't a high value product anymore, the market is flooded, there is more music coming out per minute now than you can listen to.

But it's all good, I'll keep paying for Spotify because Spotify pays all the artists I listen to.

1000%