From the listener POV it’s pretty much ace. Almost the music ever in one instantly accessible place? Amazing!
From the artist POV however it’s fucked, and I’m not sure there’s any way back now, short of some sort of unionised effort for everyone to pull their music down from streaming services and not replace it until the services agree to start paying people fairly.
Running Disintegration State, we’ve had literally thousands (possibly tens of thousdands) more listeners on streaming services than through bandcamp, but by my estimation we’ve made around 60 times as much income from bandcamp. The actual amounts are still really small because the label is tiny, but a single bandcamp purchase quite literally pays as much as thousands of streams. That’s no exaggeration, and it’s insane.
Plus in the world of ambient - where we’re often operating - Spotify now has a set of in-house artists (often suspiciously named in a similar ways to actual, pre-existing artists) that they put on their ambient ‘sleep/relaxing’ type playlists, which they heavily promote and then end up with tens of thousands of followers. Some of the tracks by these Spotify constructed ‘artists’ have tens of millions of plays which could have gone to little struggling independents who have been creating beautiful music in obscurity and poverty for years.
