Technology

They don't pay equally to everyone. They benefit large artists more than smaller ones. If you only listen to your totally unknown friend's music on Spotify, most of your money will still go to popular artists you don't listen to, and your friend will get nothing because they're below the threshold of getting a payment. It's basically theft. Now if some of those popular artists are Spotify themselves behind the scenes, guess where your money is being funneled.

Take it this way, if 1 person pays 10$ a month for Spotify and gets about 50 hours of music out of it, it's more beneficial for Spotify if a significant portion of that time is spent on music they pump into the playlists themselves, which costed them pennies to make, instead of having that user listen to real artists, that will ask for actual pay in exchange for their streams. They're not paying a little bit to make alot, they're paying a little bit to avoid paying even more. It's basically average desk job employee outsourcing their work to indians who get like a dollar a day and are happy with it cus it's their only option

Probably they find net zero (minus cost of hiring musicians) preferred over paying out a moderate income to actual artists. Capitalism at its finest.