🌸 fact is, if you pay for Spotify you are giving the company $120 a year, but for the bands you listen to to collectively get $120 a year at $0.003 per stream, you would have to stream 40,000 songs, which is something in the realm of 5 hours of music a day depending on the length of songs you listen to. maybe you listen to 5 hours of music a day, I certainly do some days--maybe you even do that every day. but if you pirated all that music for free and spent $20 on either a merch item or going to a show from 6 bands then you've given $120 to artists without any going to a streaming service (and yeah they won't keep 100% of that the merch costs something etc but it's a hell of a lot more than a third of a cent per song) regardless of how many songs you listened to for free

this burned out music artist is just begging you to just torrent and soulseek and share with friends and stop feeding the corporate machine that's strangling music