The Cost of Streaming

March 30, 2026 Newsletter

Dearest Prattlers,

This week’s newsletter features Junior Writing major Sydney Brewer’s insights on music streaming platforms and how they alter our relationships to music. Sydney Brewer (she/her) is a third-year writing major. She writes prose-poetry and fiction about diasporic experiences, language, and memory.

Without further ado, here is Sydney’s newsletter,

The Cost of Streaming

@donaldoivanbarber/TikTok / Adobe Stock / @miss.mia777/TikTok

Following last year when Spotify began running Ads for ICE recruitment as a part of the agency’s hundred million dollar “wartime recruitment” plan, I made the decision to move away from music streaming services. In place I began to purchase music, use an mp3 software, and started digging out all my thrifted CDs from high school. What began as a way to distance myself from economic investments in institutions such as ICE, or Helsing, the military AI start-up that the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, has within the last six months become the chairman of, quickly grew into a larger reflection on streaming culture. Throughout this process, I’ve realized how deep the effect of streaming has been on my personal relationship with music. I’m interested in the way that we interact with art, the way we compensate artists, and the way we curate our own taste in a digital landscape where thoughtless and algorithmic consumption comes easily. 

The difficulty for musicians to make ends meet through their work is nothing new, there’s a long history of concert sales supplementing incomes, and bad contracts with record companies, but streaming services in the twenty-first century have definitely played a role in the worsening of this. Last year Spotify paid artists around $0.0003-$0.0005 per-stream, only compensating artists once they reach 1,500 streams. These constraints can make it incredibly difficult for smaller artists in particular to gain compensation for their work. If an artist’s song were to reach 10,000 streams they would be paid from $3-$5 dollars. In this hypothetical, let’s say that those 10,000 streams are from 100 people. If even half of those people were to directly pay the artists $3 for the track that would result in 30 times the profit. Apple Music pays artists slightly more at $0.01 per stream, but that still results in a much lower profit than if the artists were being paid directly. Music streaming services haven’t only impacted the way that musicians earn a living, they’ve also impacted the way that we as a society consume music and think about fair compensation. Users either pay these platforms directly or are subjected to advertisements for corporations with violent agendas. There’s a distance created between musicians and listeners. It’s a system wherein we’re outsourcing the compensation of the artists whose work we’re engaging with. 

I’ve also started thinking about streaming in terms of passive consumption; the way that streaming makes it easier to be less discerning when supporting artists. As well as the way streaming services and large corporations acting as go-betweens between artists and consumers has changed the way we feel about consuming art made by morally reprehensible people. You’re not purchasing a song or album, you’re “liking it,” or saving it to a folder or playlist. Streaming makes the act of listening to music or supporting an artist feel more abstracted, and this can lead to less thoughtful consumption. There was a moment about a month ago when users on Tik Tok began making videos about how they weren’t aware that some of the artists that they were listening to regularly were actually AI. The knee jerk reaction I, and many others, had was to wonder how it is possible that you could be a fan of somebody and not even know if they were real or not? A lot of the responses to this question held the same sentiment: The songs were recommended, that you don’t have to know things about an artist to save their music and listen to it. I believe there’s a sort of loss of discernment that we experience through algorithmic, scroll-based platforms. While there is a level of implicit curation that goes on with our algorithms we aren’t actually seeking out the media on our feeds. When I was using streaming services I would often find myself in “music slumps” where even my favorite songs would only conjure up feelings of ambivalence within me. Since I’ve moved away from streaming I’ve found that being more intentional about what I listen to and having less options has actually lessened that kind of malaise. 

Spotify and Apple Music have also played a role in the gamification of music consumption. Features like their respective end of the year ‘Wrapped’s, Friends activity, and Spotify’s newly re-instated DMs, are all contributing to the transformation of music streaming into another form of social media. From the perspective of a streaming service, followers, comments, and messages, are all ways to up user engagement. Certain features on Spotify like jams and blends, only exist behind a paywall, which increases the number of people that subscribe.

I’m not making the case that not streaming music is easy. For a while the concept of streaming, of constant, readily available content, existed as a sort of phantom limb to me. No, avoiding these platforms and services isn’t convenient, but inconveniencing yourself is the point. Supporting artists, making conscious decisions about where your money is going, these are all elements of being an active participant in your community. In 2020, Bandcamp began their Bandcamp Fridays, which are periodic days when their revenue share is waived and all payments go directly to artists and record labels. The next Bandcamp Friday will be May 1! When the time comes if you’re able and interested, think about buying a track or album by an artist you love, or by a new artist. 

Here’s a short list of albums and songs I would recommend from the past year: Forward by First Day Back, Blizzard by Dove Ellis, Moneyball by Dutch Interior, “MOTHER” by KatzPascale.

Thank you for reading.

Yours,

Ella Ferrero

Managing Editor