Technology

Your math assumes those people only have one track on Spotify. I currently have 25 tracks on Spotify. Without advertising or promotion of any kind, I earned about $12 this year. The big problems are:

1. New rules apply per song, so if ALL my songs got 999 streams, that would be $75 they wouldn't pay me--if ONE song hit the magic 1000 streams they would pay me $3 and I still wouldn't get the other $72
2. They are still making money off my streams, they are just coming up with ways not to pay me for it while still claiming to be "artist focused"
3. They claim the "small payments" usually don't get claimed anyway so they don't see the need to make them--this is ideologically "paying with exposure"
4. By your logic, since $33,975 annual income is the federal poverty level, anyone making less than that should not complain about not getting paid at all--you can obviously insert any arbitrary amount here to support the "logic" of "that's not much so nothing at all is just as good"

I have no delusions about ever making a living off Spotify (or my extremely niche music in general), but the idea that a corporation should be able to monetize my work and not have to pay me anything for it is sort of distasteful