Has it made earning a living even harder though? Before streaming it was much harder to discover obscure artists from places outside of your own local area, usually you'd go crate-digging vinyls at 2nd hand shops to find the true gems.

I don't understand how enabling access to music from anywhere in the world has made earning a living harder to music artists, the industry was always extremely hard outside of a few lucky ones hand picked by labels to be marketed. The local scenes were (and still are) where most artists could grow their audience, sell albums and merch, it's still the same hard work but now you are able to release your music worldwide in an instant.

Streaming doesn't pay enough on any platform to enable earning a living if you are a small act. And it never will, it's basic economics, there's not enough money from subscriptions and ads to support the millions and millions of artists.

Support the artists, that's orthogonal to Spotify or other streaming services. Buy their albums, merch, go watch their shows.

I guess I agree with you (and others making the same argument) but feel like it is ultimately arguing that to support artists, you need to go outside Spotify, which to me implies something is broken about it.

Maybe that's the nature of things but I think part of that argument is there could be something better. Maybe it's beside the point from a practical perspective but I guess I agree with that too. I think finding and supporting small artists probably never has been better, but I'm not sure if that's because of Spotify per se, or social media and the Internet in general.

> I guess I agree with you (and others making the same argument) but feel like it is ultimately arguing that to support artists, you need to go outside Spotify, which to me implies something is broken about it.

Something is broken: the market for music.

People are not willing to spend a lot more for music (not digitally at least), so the economics of it are broken, there's a lot of content, done with passion, and any passion industry is bound to underpay because people will do it for non-monetary reasons like self-fulfillment, expression, etc.