When the pandemic hit last year, British singer-songwriter Nadine Shah saw her income dry up.
Her concert bookings vanished and, at age 34, she moved back in with her parents on the north-east coast of England.
Like struggling musicians everywhere, Shah - whose dark alto and eclectic songs have brought her critical acclaim and a niche following - began to examine her livelihood as an artiste.
Money from the streams of her songs on services like Spotify and Apple Music was practically nonexistent, she said, adding up to "just a few pounds here and there".
She joined other disillusioned musicians in organising online to push for change.
Last year, she testified before a parliamentary committee that has been examining the economics of streaming, raising the prospect of new regulation.
"If we got paid a meaningful income from streaming, that could be a weekly grocery shop; it could contribute to your rent or mortgage when you need it the most," Shah said. "I saw so many artistes struggling."
In Britain, more than 150 artistes - including Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Sting - signed a letter asking Prime Minister Boris Johnson for reforms in the streaming economy.
In the United States, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, has waged a guerilla campaign against Spotify, demanding higher payouts.
While many musicians paint Spotify as the enemy, the shift to streaming in the past decade has returned the industry to growth after years of financial decline.
Complaints about streaming are as old as streaming itself. Soon after Spotify arrived in the US in 2011, musicians began combing through their royalty statements, raising alarms about the fractions of a penny they got for each click.
Back then, streaming was an unproven model. Now, it is the dominant mode of consumption, making up 83 per cent of recorded music revenues in the US.
Spotify - which has 356 million users worldwide, including 158 million paying subscribers - paid more than US$5 billion (S$6.6 billion) to music rights holders last year.
The heart of musicians' critique is how the money is distributed.
Major record labels, after shrinking for much of the 2000s, are now posting huge profits. Yet artistes say not enough of the bounty has made its way to them.
Part of the dispute is over streaming's basic economics.
Spotify, Apple Music and most major platforms use a so-called pro rata system of royalty distribution. Under this model, all the money collected from subscribers or advertisements for a given month goes into one pot, which is then divided by the total number of streams.
If, say, Canadian rapper Drake had 5 per cent of all streams in a month, he and the companies handling his music get 5 per cent of the pot - meaning he effectively gets 5 per cent of each user's money, even those who have never heard his music.
This system, critics say, favours artistes with mass appeal. Features such as playlisting and algorithmic recommendations contribute to an effect in which popularity begets more popularity, putting niche genres at a disadvantage and extending the gulf between music's haves and have-nots.
Industry estimates put Spotify's payout rate for recordings at about US$4,000 per million streams, or less than half a cent a stream.
As that money may pass through a record firm before reaching an artiste, hundreds of millions of streams may be needed for an artiste to net anything substantial.
The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers has called on Spotify to pay 1 cent a stream, which may be impossible under the platform's current model. The company says it pays about two-thirds of its revenue to rights holders, and that amount depends on how many users and streams the service has at any given moment.
Spotify also has a free tier that lets users listen to music with advertisements, reducing the average amount each user contributes to the pot.
Apple, which has no free tier - and is battling Spotify over antitrust issues in Europe - says its Apple Music service pays an average of about a penny a stream, counting payments for both recordings and songwriting.
In October last year, the British Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee opened an inquiry on the economics of streaming music, and the hearings - with aggressive questioning of technology and record executives - have riveted the industry. Its report is expected in the coming weeks.
Despite artistes' gripes, contracts at major record companies have been evolving in recent years in ways that benefit performers. Joint-venture deals and shorter commitments are now more common.
And the royalty rate is going up.
A 2002 study by Professor Steven Wildman of Michigan State University found that, on average, artistes getting their first contract from a label were offered royalty rates of 15 to 16 per cent.
Mr Tony Harlow, chief executive of Warner Music UK, said this year that since 2015, its royalty payments to artistes had been "raised from 27 to 32 per cent".
But that may be cold comfort for older acts stuck with lower rates.
Eve 6, the alternative-rock band whose 1998 hit Inside Out has more than 100 million streams on Spotify, is not recouped on its original contract and earns nothing from the song's streams, said Jon Siebels, the band's guitarist.
NYTIMES
