What hurts artists, and music in general, is that Spotify pays them a share of global streaming numbers. If I were designing Spotify today, knowing what we know now, I would do it differently.
I would split 80% of each person’s monthly subscription among the artists that person actually listens to. Say you pay £10 a month and listen to just one song this month: that artist gets £8. If you listen to songs by two artists, the £8 is split between them, according to how many of their songs you listened to, not how many times you played them. Where an artist is signed to a label, the money would go to the label and reach the artist under the terms of their agreement.
This would also fix a problem Spotify has never solved: it only really works for popular music. If you are a classical or jazz musician, you cannot make a living from it.
Today, a classical listener’s £10 goes into the same pot as everyone else’s and is divided by share of all streams. Whoever streams the most decides where the money goes. Someone who plays pop in the background eight hours a day has far more say over their subscription than a classical fan has over theirs, even though they pay the same. So a person who listens only to Bach ends up paying mostly for chart music.
Every stream is also worth the same, whether it is a two-and-a-half-minute pop song or a twenty-minute movement of a symphony. An evening of jazz or classical produces a handful of streams. The same evening of pop produces dozens. The current model rewards length in the wrong direction and penalises music that asks you to sit and listen.
In my version, a classical fan’s money would go to classical musicians and a jazz fan’s money to jazz musicians, however much the rest of the world streams. This isn’t just theory. When France’s Centre National de la Musique and Deloitte modelled a similar system, they estimated classical music would gain 24% in revenue, blues 18% and jazz 10%, at the expense of rap (-21%) and hip-hop (-19%).1 Even then, rap and hip-hop combined would remain the biggest streaming genre. Popular music would still be popular. It would just stop being paid for by people who don’t listen to it.
Why would Spotify keep only 20%? I may have borrowed that from OnlyFans, which takes the same cut from its creators and is reported to have the highest revenue per employee of any company: an average of $37.6 million per employee in 2024.2 Spotify, with 7,323 employees at the end of 2025, is a very different shape of company. After paying for its music and delivering it, Spotify keeps roughly a third of its revenue, with a gross margin of around 32% across 2025. Of that, about 19% goes on running the company and its operating margin was 13%.3 On 20%, today’s Spotify would barely break even. It would have to become a much leaner company. If 20% is good enough for OnlyFans, it should be good enough for Spotify.
References
- Deloitte, for France’s Centre National de la Musique, modelling user-centric payouts on streaming data: CNM study, figures by genre summarised by Jazzfuel and Music Ally. ↩
- OnlyFans’ revenue per employee and its 20% cut, reported from the company’s 2024 accounts: Business Standard. ↩
- Spotify’s full-year 2025 results — headcount, revenue and operating profit: Music Business Worldwide, from Spotify’s Q4 2025 shareholder deck. ↩
First posted on LinkedIn, Fri 25 September 2026. · All Friday Thoughts