Those numbers seem fairly comparable to CD's to me.
Let's run some numbers. After subtracting manufacturing, shipping & retailer cuts, a label makes about $3-5 from a record, and sends about $1 of that to the artist. So for the sake of argument, let's say you need to sell a thousand CDs to make the same revenue as a million Spotify streams. Given ~10 tracks per album, that means that the crossover point is 100 album plays. IOW, if I play an album on Spotify more than 100 times, I give the recording company more money than I would if I bought the CD.
That seems like totally fair pricing. I have no idea how many times the average CD is listened to but I bet it's above 100. The median would be below 100, but the mean above. The albums that are listened to 10's of thousands of times would really skew the average.
Let's run some numbers. After subtracting manufacturing, shipping & retailer cuts, a label makes about $3-5 from a record, and sends about $1 of that to the artist. So for the sake of argument, let's say you need to sell a thousand CDs to make the same revenue as a million Spotify streams. Given ~10 tracks per album, that means that the crossover point is 100 album plays. IOW, if I play an album on Spotify more than 100 times, I give the recording company more money than I would if I bought the CD.
That seems like totally fair pricing. I have no idea how many times the average CD is listened to but I bet it's above 100. The median would be below 100, but the mean above. The albums that are listened to 10's of thousands of times would really skew the average.