I spent 258,687 minutes of my year in 2021 listening to music on Spotify. This isn’t a way for me to flex on anyone (although it is a subtle flex—there are only 525,600 minutes in a year so I spent almost 50% of my year listening to music), but just for me to highlight how much I’ve used Spotify. I love it, really. After all, I wouldn’t have spent so much time using the platform if I didn’t love the music and how easy Spotify was to use as much as I do.

This is what makes the reality of the music streaming industry so disheartening for me. The hours of my day I spend listening to my favorite artists to “support” them do little to nothing in terms of actually financially supporting them.

Before, I used to think music streaming platforms were amazing. They allowed me to discover so many artists that I never knew existed, not to mention, how many artists I saw blow up through social media and music streaming platforms. As a result, I thought that these platforms were the best way for an artist to live off their work and for me to support them. If I liked an artist and listened to their music a lot and added it to my playlists, other people could see me doing it and, hopefully, that would bring more traffic to them. For the most part, I feel like this was the original intent of streaming services like Tidal, Spotify, or Apple Music. In the beginning, the focus of these platforms was actually centered around the music and musicians. After all, the music was the product.

Unfortunately, as time has passed, this has changed. Gone are the days where music and the musicians were the most important elements to a streaming platform. Now, the priority for these streaming platforms has become generating profits by focusing on selling advertisements and selling users different plans and services.

While these platforms have reached new heights of success, the musicians they showcase have not seen the same positive growth or results. By the end of 2021, Spotify had revenue of $10.93 billion and more than 180 million subscribers. Apple Music made $4.1 billion in revenue for 2021. Both platforms even managed to substantially grow the number of paying subscribers amid a global pandemic that was notoriously hard for musicians. But while these services were raking in billions of dollars in profit, musicians were being paid less than a cent per stream. For instance, Spotify only paid its musicians three-tenths to one-half of a cent per stream. This already seems like an awfully low number when you consider that Spotify has actually lowered this payout from an average of $0.00521 per stream in 2014 to an average of $0.0033 per stream. It’s hard to truly grasp how underpaid artists actually are without looking at specific artists. Drake was Spotify’s best-paid artist and earned 37% more than the second-best paid artist, J Balvin. Despite this, he made on average only $1 for every 410 streams of his music. Drake is still in a better position than most other artists on Spotify. In an op-ed for Pitchfork, Damon Krukowski, a member of the band Galaxie 500, said, Spotify only paid royalties of “$1.05 for the 5,960 times [their] single ‘Tugboat’ was played,” which after being divided amongst the three-member band resulted in a final payout of 35 cents apiece.

The fact that these streaming platforms pay the musicians on their platform little to nothing can only be classified as exploitation—something that is incredibly disheartening because while these streaming services are the “future of the music industry,” they are still actively participating in harmful practices of the past.

What is even more disappointing than the “future of the music industry” perpetuating this harmful behavior is the fact that they have no reason to do so. Spotify is perfectly capable of paying their musicians more than fractions of a cent per stream. After all, if they are willing to make a $200 million investment in someone as controversial as podcaster Joe Rogan who spreads COVID-19 misinformation and uses the N-word, they can treat their musicians better.

The heart of any streaming platform is the content they provide for the user base. Services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora need to realize that this content is music. If the Joe Rogan controversy did anything, it revealed just how much Spotify has forgotten this fact. In the face of musicians like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell threatening to pull their music from Spotify if they don’t remove Rogan and in the face of this entire situation shedding more light on how little Spotify pays its musicians, Spotify just chose to defend Rogan. They made it clear that they sided with Rogan over these musicians. In doing so, Spotify lost $4 billion in market value.

Now, for me, the issue isn’t that Spotify sided with Rogan. The issue is that they were so quick to address this controversy and were so relentless in their attempts to defend their support of Rogan (no matter how misplaced their support actually is) while simultaneously doing nothing about the issue of underpaying musicians. If Spotify was willing to try so hard to keep Rogan, the least they could have done is treat the musicians on the platform with the same level of respect and dedication.

As the music industry continues to grow and change, it is important that the way we access it does the same. What streaming services must learn is that they are only as strong as the content they provide. They are only as strong as the music they showcase. If they continue to undervalue the musicians they directly benefit from, it won’t be long before those musicians jump ship to a new platform or way to share their music. And then, who will the Spotifys of the world be left with, Joe Rogan?