The point is that the musicians still deserve to get paid from streaming. Ridiculous nonsense to say that if something isn't well remunerated, might as well go the illegal route and not pay anything at all.
Not ridiculous at all. If you use the service that pays the artists below the value, you are endorsing that underpayment. You're literally voting with your wallet that underpaying the artists is fine.
Pirating doesn't support the artists, but it's also not weakening their expected rights for future business contracts, which supporting services like Spotify does; after all, if all these other artists are getting paid 'x' much, and all these consumers think this is what it's worth, how is anyone but Beyonce or Swift or Kanye gonna have any hope of arguing against that?
There is no way to inform Spotify that you don't endorse their business practices, except to not subscribe. Subscribing is an endorsement.
Personally, I purchase my music individually on iTunes (and download and convert to mp3). Apple still takes a cut, but it's much lower than the near-100% cut that streaming services take.
All the main music services operate on the 70/30 split in favour of the license holders.
If you pay $10 for a subscription, $7 gets put into a pool with all the subscription and ad revenue for your country, and that gets divided out proportionally based on the playback in your country. If Taylor Swift gets 10% of the plays in the US, she gets 10% of the pot.
If you're of the opinion that pirating artists' music is better for them in the long run, that's cool. But at least be informed on what the business model you're complaining about actually entails.
And then you can see that the bitrate is 2-20x better. I personally get bothered by anything under CD quality (44.1kHz 16-bit) so all these platforms are basically unlistenable for me.
