A growing number of artists don't make albums anymore, either physical or something that can be purchased. I don't understand, but their choice.

However, I only buy albums (preferably physically, will accept flac download), so they won't be getting money from me.

It's kinda funny, lots of artists will sell you a vinyl or cassette tape before they make their music purchasable digitally. I seems to be that the market for digital downloads is completely dead and not worth the effort.

I mean yeah a growing number cause the internet let’s u discover more coming up artists but I’d say nearly all established ones do.

I’d love a way to directly Cash app or Zelle my favorite artist

You kind of can with Bandcamp's "pay this much or more" model, though obviously there's a substantial percentage taken.

Bandcamp docks 15% for revenue share and charges a payment processor fee. Someone recently paid $4.00 for an album I published and Bandcamp gave me $3.15 of it

and if the online calculators are right, I think it would then take several thousand streams to earn close to $3.15 from Spotify

Assemblage 23 used to do this on their website. It was labeled something like "for anyone who pirated our music and feels bad about it, you can chip in here". But it seems to have been long removed

I guess the closest equivalent is Bandcamp where artists can still use a pay-what-you-want model

Same though.

Spotify killed lofi hip hop? Lets continue use spotify but use playlists.

I don’t do any of the streaming services, but the bugginess around owned music in the Apple Music player is getting seriously frustrating.

Who gets the money?

On Bandcamp Fridays 100% goes to the artist/label

if you are putting $12/mo into a big pot via Spotify there's way less money available to pay artists than if you buy a few albums outright a month, it takes a lot of Spotify streams to earn an artist a dollar. If you stream an album a few thousand times on Spotify maybe it works out in the artists' favor, I suppose.

Spotify the split is 70% rights holders and 30% for Spotify

and crucially, it's not taking 70% of your $12/month and parceling it out to the artists you listen to, it's taking everyone's money and putting it in a big bucket and parceling out it proportionally by stream numbers, so you can't direct $8.40 to an artist by only streaming them.

If you want to direct a few dollars to an artist you really do need to buy their music (or mech), or somehow give them a couple thousand streams.