You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music Highlight

There are 10 million artists on Spotify, but Spotify’s own Loud and Clear site shows that in 2022 95% of the total royalties went to the top 200,000 or so artists, and the top 40 all earned at least $10 million each. Of the top 1000 artists on Spotify when I last checked, only 38 of them were even nominally indie, as best I could determine. Most of those deserved asterisks for either turning independent after already becoming famous (like Radiohead) or being on a major regional label (like Eslabon Armado on the California regional-Mexican label DEL Records or Official HIGE DANdism on the Japanese label Pony Canyon).