> Paid out like Spotify pays out artists.
As others said, Spotify pays shit for artists, but maybe that's the problem with the whole thing here. It should be more like how Bandcamp pays artists (80% to the artists, 20% for Bandcamp), but then the rapacious economy supporting the largest LLM providers would collapse and (wipes away a single tear) we'd all have to use simpler, cheaper, most likely local models.
“Since Spotify pays out two-thirds of all music revenue to the industry – almost 70% of what we take in – as Spotify revenues grow, music payouts have grown as well. “
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-01-28/2025-music-industry-...
That’s not that far off from 80%.
It's not evenly distributed. Big labels get much better payouts per listen than independent artists